


El Viaje Misterioso de los Hermanos Winchester

by regala_electra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-27
Updated: 2007-06-27
Packaged: 2017-10-22 00:26:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regala_electra/pseuds/regala_electra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“The Sunshine State,” Sam intones, as though he’s reading an ancient accursed incantation and not a splashy billboard welcoming them to the state of orange groves, Disneyworld, and cheerfully corrupt election hijinks.</i> Sam and Dean head down to Miami to investigate strange drownings that may be connected to an honest-to-God <i>mermaid</i>. But nothing's clear-cut and things get weirder and weirder as the murder count rises and one of the boys finds himself under the Siren's sway. Throw in some excellent Cuban food, investigations in the heart of Little Havana, and a stolen boat leading to a ride ending in bondage (<i>"Are you ready, Odysseus?”</i>). <b>Welcome to Miami</b>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bienvenido a Miami

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [](http://spn-j2-bigbang.livejournal.com/profile)[**spn_j2_bigbang**](http://spn-j2-bigbang.livejournal.com/) ficathon. Massive thanks to my betas [](http://ignited.livejournal.com/profile)[**ignited**](http://ignited.livejournal.com/) and [](http://nekare.livejournal.com/profile)[**nekare**](http://nekare.livejournal.com/) for correcting my maddening grammatical errors, fixing the Spanish in the story so that it is no longer unintentionally bad, and generally just being very awesome. I also give great thanks to all who have listened to me ramble about my Evil Mermaid fic for many, many moons. [](http://ignited.livejournal.com/profile)[**ignited**](http://ignited.livejournal.com/), bless you and one day you'll be sainted for all your excellent beta assistance and fantastic hand-holding, I can't thank you enough for everything you've done.

  
_Atlantic Ocean, miles away from Miami, Florida  
Two Weeks Ago_

The girl’s been seasick for so long that she doesn’t understand that when her stomach rumbles, it means that she must eat. But land grows closer with each wave, and for that, she must stay awake and wait.

Her cousins, her mother has told her so many times, even before this journey was dreamed of, have big homes and everything they want and even things they don’t want. Needs do not get pushed away because there’s no hope of getting those things that they long for, in America, everything is plentiful. They won’t have to fight for the last fresh tomato in the grocery ever again.

She practices English to ignore the hunger pangs that she believes to be another onslaught of sickness. Her mother compliments her on softening the word _speak_.

“You sound like one of them,” her mother whispers, a huge compliment as Mama can only make due with a handful of expressions. They will have to learn the strange rules of English when they are safe with the rest of their family. It is important that they blend in, that they do not get caught, _deported_ , and sent back before making it to land. There is nothing to go back to, not anymore.

Their family in Florida has been careful to ensure safe passage – they had paid a coyote well to bring the girl and her mother to America – and her mother had given the last remaining family heirlooms (the ones they did not sell, the ones that have been in their family since the Spanish colonized Cuba) to the man who had smuggled them onto the boat after they had made it to the halfway point on their raft.

But the mysterious coyote, the one who was discussed in carefully censored phone conversations for the past month, did not accompany them on this journey. Instead he put an old man in charge: a man who had filmy eyes the color of runny cement.

When he had steered the boat (closer and closer to their new, permanent home, but never _their_ country), he moved at a slow pace, keeping the motor from getting too noisy, often frowning at the many strange buttons and gadgets fitted on the dashboard. He would occasionally tap a fingertip to the glass casings.

He has not been at the helm for a long time.

His nails are bruised black and it makes her shudder. Now these blunt-edged fingers tap on the little counter space, making a dull _rat-tat-tat_ that sounds disturbingly like gunfire.

They have been cooped up in the small cabin all day, the heat only eased by the open door and now, mercifully, by night air.

It has been two days of waiting. “Because Americans have tightened patrol,” he tells them, in a heavy accent. America has coarsened his native tongue.

The girl wonders if she will eventually find herself unable to converse with others in her natural rapid-fire pattern as she does now – if she will dream in English and find Spanish a burden to speak, as the old man seems to find when he bothers to speak to them.

There is a call on the man’s slim cellular phone, the sleek ghostly shine of well-polished silver, and he answers it in front of the girl and her mother. He doesn’t carry on much of a conversation, simply responding with _yes_ and _no_ noises, not even real words and he ends the call with a bitter laugh.

“On the deck.” He has to say it twice – they don’t understand him the first time.

Her mother has to hold her arm to steady the girl’s balance as she takes the few steps up onto the deck, slippery with droplets of water. As she stands there, seeing the waves hit the boat harder and harder, she realizes that she feels no need to empty her stomach into the ocean. Yes, she can feel the ache in her stomach loosen, watching the ocean as it undulates fiercer while she stares into the inscrutable depths. Perhaps she has finally grown accustomed to the ceaseless rocking and can attempt to eat food without fear of another attack of seasickness. For a fleeting moment she almost-glimpses a flicker of silvered gold skittering across the black waves.

She smiles, filled with the peaceable joy of a fast that can finally, mercifully, be broken. In this fragile moment, she does not see the shadow out of the corner of her peripheral vision, the leafy green rope in the old man’s hands, until he’s bound it tight around her neck. Twisting her around, he pulls her head up by yanking at her shoulder-length hair, not allowing her to move.

The tears that sting the corners of her eyes are salt, just like everything out here, including the warmed bottles of _spring water_ stocked in a broken cooler in the cramped cabin. She can barely remember water that is not full of salt.

If she looks at her mother, she will cry, so she must be brave. They are so close. This can’t end like this.

He says a word, but it is not a word she recognizes as English or one that she has already come across in Spanish. It is something terrible and she makes her fatal mistake, stealing a glance at her mother, praying for this to be a waking delusion, a panic brought on by a surge of hunger-visions, such things must happen. A hallucination, yes, it must be it, for this cannot be her reality.

Her mother is transfixed, starring not at her, but at a flash of something, from behind them, _in_ the water, and the knife is raised and she can see it now, not with her eyes, but in her mind. Believe her, she sees it and with that awful vision, she knows the moment of her death and it is _too soon_.

The old man repeats the word and God save her, it is terrible. Before the terror grips her, before the knife slides in, before the rope chokes her, she is released, but it is not for salvation’s sake. She falls, over the railing, rope still around her neck, but it’s been slackened, like a mockery of a necklace.

Hitting the water is more painful that she expects. Sucking in air before impact does nothing to help and she struggles to break the surface, to steal a little air, because she must deny this, why would they _kill_ her?

When she surfaces, a large dark thing sinks beside her, mere feet away, falling into the water, a splash that nearly sends the girl below the water once more. Balance is difficult to keep but she fights the ebb and flow, refuses to be dragged down. She sputters out water. Knows that it can only be one person, that this is real and not madness, and it is fortunate that tears can be unnoticed in water. She has been the strong one in the family ever since Papi’s death.

She grabs blindly but cannot reach the hand. Her mother’s hand.

Her mother screams for God, for forgiveness, pleading _why_ to the old man as he watches, but there is no answer. The girl feels no need to cry out her lamentations.

It is quiet here, when the girl tries to focus on what else there is surrounding them, yet all she can make out are her mother’s broken cries. Beyond that, there is only the sound of the water hitting the boat. The sounds of the ocean, alive and unwilling to save her, it is up to her whether she lives or dies. She is a strong swimmer, but not strong enough.

Something pulls at her leg, a tug that feels nothing like a shark. It’s worse than that, cutting into her flesh, _wrapping around_ , a tight grasp that holds her still. Her mother vanishes under the water first, cut off mid-scream.

The last thing she sees before the ocean swallows her whole is the old man, holding an old-fashioned lantern close to his face.

Her last thought is that her murderer had tears in his eyes.

*

 _Somewhere in Georgia  
Present Day_

They’re ten miles from the border of Florida, cruising down Interstate 95 (okay, by _cruising_ , that means Dean-style cruising, which translates to the kind of speeding violations that merits a person’s license getting shredded), when Dean announces, “Maybe it’s just Jaws and he’s out for another sequel. _Jaws 18: Jaws Versus Crocazilla_. You never know, dude. We don’t have a bigger boat and the car isn’t tricked out like in the spy movies. You know, amphibious.”

“Dean, we have to check this out,” Sam says, looks up from a small pile of papers, one leg jumping in impatience ever so slightly. “First a fishing boat gets ‘attacked’ and by that, they mean that four people wind up falling off the ship even though the weather conditions were fine during the middle of the night. The survivor, this twelve year old girl, insisted that something took them when the police filed their first report. They finally find two of the bodies and the eyes were missing, like they were _plucked out_ but there’s no indication of it being a shark because there weren’t any bites. I mean, the bodies not being disturbed by anything else out there in the ocean? What are the chances of that?”

Sam doesn’t give Dean a moment to start in with talk of how this may or may not be their kind of thing, continuing, “Then there’s the story of two bodies washing up on shore, Cuban refugees, which yeah, Cubans trying to escape to America, winding up dead thanks to shady voyages, that does happen, but they died the same way. The coroner had reported that they had the same injuries before they drowned. They’re saying it’s a shark attack but they can’t even find any evidence of a shark.” A quick pause, to catch his breath lest Dean start making with the snappy jokes, he finishes by saying, “I’m thinking a water spirit. Or maybe it’s some kind of a creature. It could be something similar like back in Lake Manitoc.”

“Messed up three hour tours aside,” Dean says, nearly twitching when he realizes they’re now minutes from hitting the border, “it’s _Florida_.”

Like Sam doesn’t know that already.

“Yeah. _I know_. We just have to get in there and get out. And,” Sam hastily adds, seeing Dean’s lip curling into his trademark lecher’s smirk, “don’t even start—”

Eyebrows raise and Dean shoots him a wounded look. “Dude, that’s _so_ an opening.” Clearing his throat, Dean carries on, “If you’re just getting in and getting out, you ain’t doing it right.”

“Thanks,” Sam replies, wanting to bang his head on the dashboard a couple of times to get the image out of his head. It brings up memories of Dean’s way too explicit sex advice to Sam when he was a teenager and didn’t know any better about keeping Dean from being allowed to converse in great detail about one of his very favorite topics. Sam decides against banging his head after weighing the pros and cons. First of all, it would hurt and secondly, he’s not about to waste any brain cells. One of them has to have a functioning head above the belt. “Really, thanks for that, Dean, we were running low on your normal lasciviousness.”

Dean chuckles at that, jerkitude in full force, while he fiddles with the radio, avoiding the pop station that’s trying to break on through. The mere idea of Top Forty being played in the Impala is an insult to everything Dean holds dear, as Dean had warned him the few times Sam’s been allowed to drive the car. “Oh yeah, whipping out the big vocab guns, huh? Twenty dollar words ain’t gonna help you now. Welcome to hell.”

“The Sunshine State,” Sam intones, as though he’s reading an ancient accursed incantation and not a splashy billboard welcoming them to the state of orange groves, Disneyworld, and cheerfully corrupt election hijinks. They’ve still got hours to go before they hit Miami, a pit stop is needed but not sleep, they’ve already had a merciful night’s sleep back in North Carolina.

Maybe Dean’s right and they should just hang a U-Turn and head on elsewhere.

Dean’s attempts to find a suitable station have failed spectacularly as an entirely unexpected song starts blasting – a mash up of heavy hip-hop being sung in Spanish.

“Dammit,” Dean grunts, irritably flicking off the radio and pushing in a well-worn, well-loved tape of AC/DC. He sighs in approval as _Highway to Hell_ kicks on. It is appropriate considering where they’re going so Sam won’t bitch about having to listen to AC/DC in each state they’ve crossed since they left Connecticut. Another mile zooms by before Dean speaks again, asking Sam, “What the hell was that music?”

“Reggaeton?” It’s a bit of a blind scramble guess; Sam’s musical education may not be as questionable as Dean’s, but he doesn’t get a chance, particularly now, to follow up on current trends. Not when music released pre-C.D. becomes the background noise of your daily life.

Dean stares at Sam, that patented look of irritation well achieved thanks to an annoying little brother, a look so honestly flustered that Sam almost cracks a smile. There’s no smiling in Florida. Especially not when Sam’s a ticking time-bomb apparently and he’s set to go darkside at any moment.

 _Especially_ when Sam’s gotten a promise out of Dean that he still isn’t sure will be kept. His brother had been too relieved when he’d witnessed Sam’s admittedly pathetic hangover and had assumed that Sam had blacked out what he’d said...okay, Sam has to stop thinking about this. He knows it’s impossible, no way to keep it from encroaching on all his thoughts, but they have something to investigate and now they’re arguing about music. Necessary distractions.

“Sam,” Dean says in a gentle voice, almost cajoling, “I know Reggae. Bob Marley. _That_ was not Reggae. That was hip-hop crap gone retarded.”

“It’s a form of Spanish dance hall music,” Sam answers patiently, wondering how Dean has avoided hearing it. He’s pretty sure that, on those rare occasions when they’ve gone into slightly more trendy clubs for investigations, the DJs have had this type of music playing, but maybe Dean’s fine-tuned to ignoring anything recorded with a copyright date set after the second millennium. That would explain a lot of things. “Mostly it’s a mix of older genres like salsa, Spanish rock, and rap.”

“Oh.” Dean takes that in, perhaps weirded out that Sam’s suddenly more knowledgeable about music than Dean, because at the very least, _Sam_ is certainly spooked by that. Glancing at the rear mirror, edging into another lane, getting out of Dean-patented cruising speed, Dean succinctly sums up a genre of music by saying, “It’s crap.”

“Yeah, uh, okay.” Sam lets out a breath that isn’t a laugh, but it’s not weary, a nice change of pace. “Maybe you should keep that opinion to yourself. Once we get to Miami I don’t think pissing off the local Cuban population will be in our best interest.”

“Cubans? In Miami? Oh Sam, pull the other one,” Dean says, smacking his right thigh. “Next you’ll tell me that New York’s smack full of Puerto Ricans.”

“Well, statistically—”

Dean raises a hand up, saying, “Cut the statistics and Cultural Anthropology 101, dude. We’re not spending any more time in Florida than we have to and I don’t care how many of whoever is wherever, got it?”

“Loud and clear,” Say says, laying the sarcasm thick, returning to the articles he’d printed off to analyze before they got to Miami.

“Dammit. I _hate_ Florida.”

Truer words were never spoken.

*

 _Flores-Norwood Home, Miami, Florida  
One Week Ago_

“You called out her name again,” his lover informs him when Henry rouses from yet another night of restless sleep.

“What name? Who was it?”

But on that, Marcos would not say. It’s more troubling than the sleep loss: Marcos’s ability to discuss everything and anything to the minute details had been the very thing that Henry loved the best. There’s always an opinion, observation or joke guaranteed when you’re with Marcos.

It’s wonderful to be able to live in the background, allowing Marcos to be the voice of both of them, a salve to a life spent in the spotlight, to people having _expectations_ of him. Now he’s merely expected to be there at the never-ending series of social events and to add a handful of words to the lively conversations – a sprinkle of pepper to Marcos’s infamous bouillabaisse of intrigues and political gossip.

His stomach rumbles and Marcos smiles, not unkindly. “When was the last time you ate? And don’t say last night, liar, you picked at risotto and let it dry so it looked like you’d eaten something.”

“Two days ago. Chicken and avocado on whole wheat.” It’s a bare recitation and still, it leaves his mouth dry. He doesn’t mention that it didn’t stay down, no need to worry Marcos. Henry can worry enough for the both of them.

“I can make you something simple.”

Henry wipes his sweaty palms on their 600-count cotton sheets before he lays a hand on Marcos’s face. “I’ll be fine.” He gets out of their bed, picking up his robe and tying the sash around his waist. He hesitates and then says, “I’ll be in the office.”

“Brooding?” Marcos is exhausted and he can only manage a half-hearted teasing frown.

“Plotting my next masterpiece.” The laugh is perfectly timed and Henry bends down to kiss the top of Marcos’s head, tousled messy from sleep and in desperate need of being cut. It’s so unlike Henry’s austere trimmed hair. Henry promises him the gentlest of lies, an apology, “I just have too many thoughts.”

“I know,” Marcos sleepily sing-songs. He tugs the sheets over his shoulders and Henry makes a note of raising the temperature on the central air unit so that Marcos doesn’t freeze tonight.

He waits until Marcos has resumed sleeping before he says quietly under his breath, “I’ll miss you.”

Then he walks out of the room, down the stairs, puts on the old boots he keeps in the mudroom. He decides, at the very last minute, not to get into their brand new motorboat, _The Surefire Glide_ , the upgrade from their older boat. No, it must be the old ’88 27ft Scorpion, a clunker that breaks down whenever they try to push it past forty-five miles per hour.

Yes, for his purposes tonight, he has to take the old _Afternoon Treader_ , so named in honor of one of Henry’s favorite childhood books. The books had even survived past his youth and into these autumn years. Marcos had gotten a rare books shop to rebind his first edition set of _The Chronicles of Narnia_ as a special birthday present for Henry’s thirty-sixth. So deceptively elegant – a set of battered paperbacks resting between fine leather covers, the names stamped in antique gold lettering.

Things like that, he will miss.

He takes the keys out of the little cabinet, touching the news article taped on one of the cabinet doors: a yellowed copy of one of Marcos’s shining successes in immigrant rights. Henry knows that Marcos will survive the fallout, that he will continue doing what he does best, making the world a bit more interesting.

Leaves the house for the last time, making sure the security is enabled, he doesn’t look back.

Perhaps he should have left a note.

He unties the thick braided ropes not from the dock but from the boat itself, done up in Henry’s expert knots, throwing the ropes on the dock. There is no need for them anymore. The boat is noisy, they’ve replaced the motor several times but it hasn’t helped at all. Henry is thankful that during the last renovation of their home, they had opted for the highest grade of hurricane windows, the panes of glass thickened to deaden outside noise.

The lights on the boat are poor and Henry did not bring additional flashlights but it does not matter, he knows the way. He has dreamt it so many times. Away and out, out of the waterway, into the ocean, a song he has been chasing since his deadline for perfection was cut drastically short. Knows it’s dangerous now, it’s too dark, and his boat wasn’t meant to go out this far.

But his dreams have been calling him here and he has already disobeyed her long enough, it is time now, though the time is still _too late_. She will be greatly displeased.

The motor dies a choking death as soon as he reaches where he needs to be and he almost laughs in relief. Of course it would last just until this final moment. Now is the time for all the promises to be fulfilled.

“Are you there?” he asks, searching across the black waters, seeking that which has always been there, waiting just for him. The voice that has offered him a hope that for all he will undoubtedly lose, he will find the symphony which has eluded him his entire life.

Bubbles rise to the surface as a light suddenly appears from below, revealing a distorted silver-gold shape struck with impossible greens in the stark black depths. It is impossible to make out the exact shape. Henry takes off his robe, kicks off his boots, taking careful steps down the three-step ladder into the water. His pajama pants get heavy with water, as though he is being dragged down. Not yet, that will come later.

A moment’s hesitation – the thought that has been lingering on his mind for too long, that he doesn’t want to die, yet he knows that this is the only way this can end – but it passes and he lets go of the ladder, the weight of his clothes a hindrance to his ability to stay afloat.

He needn’t stay above the surface for too long.

He can hear the singing start, the voice that has haunted him these past nights, the sweet surrender of security, the promise that he will not feel any pain again. She expects nothing from him save himself.

It is not arms that wrap around his chest so tight that he can _feel_ his ribs creaking. It is not a woman that pulls him underneath before he can scream in pain. He doesn’t try to steal a little air, instead he lets his lungs burn out the little oxygen he has left and there is a faint glimmer of light now and he can _see_.

She is every bit as horrifying as he has imagined.

His spirit is willing but his body is not. But then, that has always been the problem. He struggles to fight the strong grip until he hears her voice, singing the song he has been chasing for all his life. The song that came into shape since the doctor offered the grim diagnosis, an early onset case that couldn’t have been anticipated, not even with his family’s medical history. The promise of life, even in death.

He surrenders to her gladly.

Five days later, his corpse will wash up on the beach, disturbing beachgoers looking to burn off hours by soaking in the rays and playing in the water. Before the Miami P.D. closes the crime scene, photographs of Henry Norwood, cherished pianist and composer, are released over the internet. Of particular interest is the photo of Henry’s face, contorted into a disfigured scream, the flesh bloated with water and the empty sockets grotesquely forced to stare directly into the camera. The skin is one good slough away from revealing the skull underneath.

His boat is never recovered.

*

 _Rest Stop, Orange County, Florida,  
Present Day_

“All right, spill it.”

“Spill what?” Sam’s still got his eyes glued to the laptop screen, moving damn quick, making fast work of whatever he’s reading.

Dean puts down his questionable breakfast burrito, licking his fingers, enjoying Sam’s disgusted look. He doesn’t really enjoy the gassy roll of his stomach as it attempts to digest the food but he ain’t about to let Sam realize that maybe Dean shouldn’t have eaten that. “Spill whatever’s got your panties in a twist, ‘cause I didn’t put any itching powder in ‘em and I know it ain’t a case of crotch rot. You think wearing the same pair of boxers two days in a row is a freakin’ sin. Spill, dude.”

Huffing, Sam says, “So now there’s been another death, same details – eyes, the marks, only his rib cage wasn’t just broken, the article has it as ‘shattered,’ in fact, like he was squeezed to death.”

“Giant squid?”

“They exist,” Sam replies, ignoring that Dean’s throwing it out there as a joke. “But no one’s ever seen a living Giant squid. But, uh, they interviewed his life partner—”

“This really a life partner or did they mistake a pair of brothers for being gay?” Yep, Dean’s still a little sore about that.

Sam clears his throat, affecting a damn near prissy tone, “I doubt Henry Norwood and Marcos Flores were related, Dean.”

“Well, but they did know each other biblically, huh? So they’re related like that,” he says, finishing with a shrug as he pokes the cooling remains of his breakfast. He shoulda gone for some muffins like Sam did, eyeing the few crumbs left on Sam’s battered plastic tray. Man, even the remains of the banana nut muffins looked a damn sight better than the slightly oozing leftovers of his own meal.

Sam presses his lips together, cursory scanning of the article before he softly says, “You seem to be kind of okay with that.” There’s a question at the end of it – genuine surprise.

“Dude, I’ve been getting hit on since before I realized what the hell was going on. That whole deal with guys being into other guys. Whatever, love comes in all forms, you know?” Dean’s never been much for having a philosophy when it comes to relationship crap, but he’s figured out that much at least. “Now hot lesbians? I _know_ you approve, Sam.”

“There’s the brother I remember,” Sam says, defeated. “So Marcos Flores has given a couple of interviews saying how Henry would’ve never killed himself and that he’d been having strange nightmares. Maybe this creature has some kind of telepathic powers. It could explain why in the first attack the twelve year old didn’t hear a thing when the rest of the people in her boat were taken. She didn’t wake up until another fisherman came across the boat. The first thing the fisherman reported was that the boat’s deck was splattered all over in blood. It could be something corporeal if it’s dragging people into the ocean.”

“Wait a second. Where the hell did you get that detail from? That wasn’t in the original article about the first set of victims.”

Sam taps on several keys before answering. His fingers have been itchy ever since he got the cast off back in New York, a quick stop off at a clinic to finally remove the stupid cast, Sam’s memento of getting tripped up by a freakin’ zombie. He’s still not quite used to not having the cast hindering his wrist movements. But when he flexes his fingers just like that, quick bend-snap, oh that ain’t just him adjusting to being cast-free.

God, Dean has to get Sam to stop it with those obvious tells, it’s why he had to be the freakin’ breadwinner when it comes to hustling, Sam’s crap at hiding body language. “Well, there’s this website dedicated to unsolved mysteries in Florida—”

“Being that there are so many,” Dean interrupts, while in his head he mentally adds that to his List of _Why Florida Is So Fucking Weird_. He’s been keeping count for a long-ass time.

“So yeah, the newspapers were covering up that one grisly detail in the hope that they didn’t have a kid serial killer on their hands and now that there’s three more bodies with similar wounds, dying almost the same way, it looks like that girl just got lucky and won’t have to deal with the Miami P.D. anymore.” Sam closes up his laptop, shaking his head. “It’s really messed up that we have to call that lucky.”

“Sometimes we gotta take what we can get,” Dean offers, trying not to let the conversation veer back to their rinse-repeat struggles with what Dad had told Dean. It’s just not something he can deal with right now, not that he’d ever _want_ to deal with it. The case, that’s what they’ve got to keep their eyes on. Eyes on the prize and all that shit. “Now, you want to back up about the telepathy? Because you’re working on a theory and I want to hear it.”

“There’s a lot of myths about one type of creature that would want to drag people off into the water and would be able to lure people from great distances.” Sam drums his fingers on the table, shifting in the uncomfortable fast food restaurant seat that’s never been able to accommodate him just right ever since he shot up his current height. Dean may not be all that cozy but he doesn’t look like he’s developing a hunchback, the way his brother sits. Sam coughs, mumbling, “Something like a Siren.”

“You’re shitting me.”

It is, after all, one of the oldest seafaring legends, men going so crazy for women that they just have to make up women not of flesh and blood, not human at all, to explain their madness – why they’d crash into the rocks that should have been so clear before the fatal collision. Sea creatures that get their jollies sending people to their watery deaths. Only good that’s come out of it are some pretty awesome movies, not like he’d say that to Sam, ‘cause he’d probably get a lecture about how that’s Not Funny.

Exasperated, Sam says, “No, Dean. Do you think I’d throw that out there just to mess with you?”

Dean blinks. “Well—”

“I’m _not_ ,” Sam says fiercely. “But if this pans out, if it’s attacking in the same place, it might be a spirit, even an elemental, but if Marcos Flores can confirm what Henry Norwood was dreaming about, he might have been lured by a siren. The way the victims are dying with such specific wounds make sense when you compare them to the legends.”

“Okay, but why now? Why those people? If Henry Norwood’s another victim, why was he lured, ‘cause the others just sound like poor bastards at the wrong place and wrong time.”

“I think that’s going to be one of those answers that’s going to suck,” Sam offers, draining the last of his coffee, tossing the empty container in a nearby trash bin. He gets up to use the men’s room and Dean makes sure to remind him to wash his hands after, earning a well-deserved eye-roll.

Dean’s already finished his coffee and he’s not angling to pick up another overpriced cup of Joe. He’s still working on his orange juice. It’s actually pretty good, he’d gotten no pulp, had insisted for it because he does not believe in surprise lumpy liquid going down his throat, no matter what Sam might bitch about his eating habits.

Unfortunately, it’s so freaking sweet, he’s sure that he’s gonna be pissing sugar later on. He’s been trying to control his jittery sugar rush and he can’t wait to get back into the car, a little high speed adrenaline and sugar will get them to Miami in no time.

In fact, it would be a _great_ idea to stand right outside the men’s room and wait until Sam opens the door and jump in front of the door just as it swings open, that unpleasant smell of rest stop bathrooms wafting out at the same moment.

Sam’s surprised twist of a mouth, nearly forming a goddamn perfect _o_ of surprise is pretty fucking funny. The punch to Dean’s arm isn’t funny at all.

“Ow, man. Okay, let’s go, let’s go. Back in the pool,” Dean says too fast, nearly bouncing with impatience, even though it’s still Fucking Florida and they’re going deeper into this cursed place and why the hell hasn’t anyone ever confirmed that Florida’s a hotbed of weird supernatural crap and closed this place down? “C’mon, Sammy, we’ve gotta go.”

A nearly beatific smile lights up Sam’s face and Dean twitches in response to Sam’s obvious enjoyment of Dean’s behavior. ‘You’re riding a sugar high, aren’t you?”

“Bite me.”

Yep, Dean’s _awesome_ with the comebacks when he’s riding that first sweet unbridled wave of sugar kicking all his systems into overdrive.

*

 _Miami Beach, Florida  
Three Days Ago_

Yvette leaves the major throng of the party, hoping to sneak away for a quiet smoke (she’s publicly anti-drugs, for the kids, you know), wading into the water to her knees. Her dress will be ruined. It’s made of delicate silk and something-or-other (her stylist had insisted on it despite the fact that Yvette had to drop five pounds just to keep her belly looking nice and flat in the unforgiving silhouette) and she doesn’t care.

It’s the standard useless Ocean Drive party – she shows up, they snap her photo and her publicist makes damn sure it winds up in the right papers and magazines. Oh, and _Nikki Style_ better use a picture favoring her _left_ side this time, or there will be hell to pay.

Her purse is useless for most things that she should be carrying, like a wallet, but no one needs to see her I.D. (and they haven’t carded her since she turned twenty-five, four years later, and she’s got _thirty_ looming with all the implications of failure if she doesn’t break out and make it onto a national show _now_ ). A couple of joints and a thin matchbook with three matches remaining, that’s all she needs, safe and secure in the trick lining she’s always required for all her bags.

It’s a costly habit, buying these bags. She can’t afford to be caught photographed with the same pair of shoes – to go around with the same old purse would simply be unheard of.

The lights of the party have dimmed, to blues and greens that glitter over the water – constant disruptive flickers of the colors dancing over the waves. Time slows down and she throws her purse as far as she can manage (her aim’s never been fantastic) when she removes the last joint of the hiding place. The splash is incredibly satisfying, a beautiful almost _surprised_ noise as it hits the water and maybe it’ll be the luxurious new home of a hermit crab. A crab in a designer purse. Stranger things have happened.

God, she’s purchased some great pot this time around, she really has to thank her dealer. She watches a giant wave of black (it’s not water, not the dark, dark glitter of a wall of water tumbling into the black-black night sky) coming towards her, all rippling and wrong and she feels her body prickling all over. Goosebumps rising on her skin despite this night being unseasonably warm.

There’s a flash of silver and ivory and she doesn’t scream, not even when the breath of rotten meat and briny sea hits her. Then there’s nothing left.

Save a pair of Jimmy Choo sandals at the water’s edge, the unlaced straps gently moving when the lapping water slowly rises as the tide gets higher. Then, the shoes disappear in the dark depths and there is nothing left of Yvette García.

*

 _Tower Hotel, Miami, Florida  
Present Day_

They find a motel distressingly lacking in the usual kitsch – no mildly offensive décor clearly picked out by someone in the midst of a major hallucination. There isn’t a theme to the room beyond the clinging desperation of being down and out.

The harsh colors have faded over time: no longer brassy yellow wallpapered walls, instead it’s become vague beige, nicked and dented so much it looks like some people were counting off the days by marking up the cheap wallpaper. Sam drops his bags on the bed: dull white pillows and bed sheets with a thin duvet tucked over the sheets haphazardly. The duvet was, at a time, allegedly green but it’s now on its way to the color of dead celery, threadbare white showing in some places.

No other option to clear out that familiar motel scent but opening up the gritty windows. Dean sneezes at the dust let loose from the curtains. “Son of a bitch.”

“Cursing at dust really does wonders,” Sam says, ignoring the itchy sensation in his nostrils.

The windows barely do a damn thing to clear out the dour antiseptic smell battling with the phantom cigarette smoke of previous occupants.

“Non-smoking,” Dean says, disgusted, kicking up the air conditioning unit. He bangs on the top of it when it fails to get any colder and Sam files that away, to be used at a later date. Next time Dean mocks Sam’s lack of mechanical skills, Sam will have an arsenal of examples of Dean’s supposed tech prowess at the ready.

Dean sits down on his bed (his bed because it’s closer to the door and that’s always the way it’s been), tentatively bouncing on it for a minute and just when he goes to make his pervy comment, Sam cuts him off at the pass.

“Great, you’ve got another sex bed. I don’t want to hear it, okay?”

“Always raining on my parade.” Shaking his head, Dean rifles through the bedside table, a hand brushing over the included bible, pulling out a bookmark better kept between the pages of a fantasy novel. It’s all dragons and wizards on an inky-purple background. He flicks it on Sam’s bed, not bothering to make a crack about Sam being a nerd. Tracing a finger on the battered dark wood surface, tapping when he finds a cigarette burn etched deep in the wood. “This right here is why asking for non-smoking is useless. At least smoking rooms are honest.”

Sam shakes off the weird image of a room being _honest_ , choosing instead to flick the bookmark onto Dean’s bed. “So, are we really going to use those fake identities to interview Marcos Flores? Because I don’t think he’ll let us in through the front door.”

“I thought you said he was known to be a man of the people and all that. He’s giving tons of interviews,” Dean says, pointedly turning on the TV and flicking around until he comes across a news show, the screen currently focusing on a picture of Henry Norwood, audio of a previously taped conversation between Flores and a journalist being aired over alternating photographs and some fuzzy video footage. “Like that. Huh. I didn’t expect that to work.”

Sam won’t ask why Dean bothered to turn on the television because that way only lies to another insufferable smart-ass answer.

“Marcos Flores is involved in the campaign to secure rights for gay and lesbian families in Florida.” Off Dean’s look, he adds, “They’re not allowed to adopt here although some families do act as foster parents. And there’s the marriage issue.”

“You know what? I’m starting to think you’re the one that makes everyone think we’re gay.”

“You should try stand up,” Sam mutters. He’s more interested in checking to make sure there aren’t any visible stains on his bed sheets and praise whatever twisted angel’s looking out for them, because the sheets appear to be within the spectrum of adequately clean.

“They pay cash money?” Dean clicks off the television, leaving the battered remote on his bed, because wherever there’s Dean and a TV, he assumes control unless he’s been knocked unconscious. Sam is grateful for torrents for this very reason.

Dean takes his wallet out, pointing at the handful of twenties he’s got left, as though Sam is to blame for taking Dean’s hard-earned ill-gotten gains. “I can’t believe we’re staying at a joint that won’t take credit cards _and_ we had to pay for the entire week upfront. Yeah, this place reeks of trust. Or is that dust?”

Dean’s a fully body sneezer and when he goes off, with a loud sneeze and one of his damn near seizures, it could be mistaken as an over-exaggeration, that huge ungainly spasm, in the eyes of someone who hasn’t had the pleasure of being sneezed _on_ by Dean on several unpleasant occasions. Which is why Sam knows to stand back as far as possible, there’s no way he’s getting himself covered in Dean’s snot.

Once the fit’s over, Dean pulls a couple of pilfered paper napkins, ragged recycled brown, from the rest stop, out of his pocket, wiping at his nose. It does leave Dean’s nostrils looking particularly charming, all irritated and red-rimmed.

Sam says, “Yeah, well, you know we still need to find out _what’s_ killing these people and so far, all we know for certain is that the victims were connected to Cuban community. If it’s random, then it’s probably a pissed off spirit or some kind of nasty creature, but if it’s not—”

“It’s a start,” Dean interrupts, punctuating his statement with a yawn. He runs his hands through his hair, leaving a spiky mess that makes Dean almost look not like Sam’s jackass older brother. Someone younger is sitting there on Dean’s bed, a person with sleepy eyes and an irritated nose and it’s like they’re kids again, only Sam doesn’t feel awkward at all, just has a bit of a tingle to his new-freed arm. “I’m gonna catch a few zzz’s, you mind ironing my suit?”

“No problem,” Sam says, wishing that sarcasm was as effective as actual dripping venom. “Then I can shine your boots. Oh wait, I’m not your freaking butler—”

“ _That’s_ what we’re missing. We got to get ourselves an Alfred. Think we can get one that’ll take a pay cut from the usual perks of workin’ for a Boy Billionaire?”

Exasperated, Sam heaves a great dramatic sigh, getting up from his bed and shutting the windows so the A/C will actually _work_ that way. “I’m taking a shower first.”

“Great, you can wipe out the slime if there’s some stuck on the tiles. And don’t use one of my damn shirts,” Dean says, bringing up an incident that happened when Sam was _fourteen_ for God’s sake, can Dean ever let it go?

“Night, Dean,” Sam responds, undercutting it with enough saccharine that could kill a Brady brother, never mind the gung-ho hyper-testosterone breed known as Winchester.

“Shut up, Sam.”

Dean’s annoyed face is almost _cute_ when he’s got a stuffy nose.

*

 _Undisclosed Location, Somewhere in Miami, Florida_

The price of a man’s soul is going cheap these days, God knows, but that doesn’t mean that a better bargain can be struck when there’s more on the line than banishment to heaven or hell. Look, here’s a deal that’s all surface (get it? Because eventually it’ll make all too much sense): he’s been hearing her for years, the faint echo of sound bouncing off water. It’s a weak frequency and the only thing he’s got to do is say yes and bring _more_ to her and then, oh yeah, he’s _golden_.

She’s all sounds and vibrations, deep in his belly and lower than that, too. He doesn’t talk about that part. Might not make it sound all honorable, what he does, convincing everyone to go along, and that’s almost what’s at stake. Honor. It’s all a form of will, isn’t it?

Get them on boat with a double negative of hope. One of those simple plans that unfolds beautifully, like a model’s legs as she gets up from her seat at a trendy outdoor café, all smooth movements and easy deceptions. The flaws are never noticed, it’s what perfection should be, but isn’t. It’s better than a double-edge sword at any rate, swearing that it’ll be worth it, that’s all that he can say.

They’d call him crazy if he told them the truth. And then they’d struggle.

Ah, he’s lying there. Only one is supposed to struggle and in the end, he struggles so beautifully, it’s almost a sin to open his gut and watch his blood coat the deck.

Sinning hasn’t been a problem for a long time. He’d smiled his coyote’s grin, the one that fools believed in, the one that’s granted him a steady income that the government will never touch, and they listened to him, so devout, so _faithful_ , and followed the instructions of the voice carried on the wind.

They don’t take the ride because they dream of America, they’re already natural citizens, what he offers is a taste of their faith, the _proof_ , that yes, they are righteous for all the right reasons.

The reports are going to be wrong, when it comes down to it. The initial investigators, the Coast Guard, the Miami P.D., they are told it was a family of five who started on that doomed voyage and why anyone lie about that?

Why say five when the answer is six?

Maybe because the “only” survivor knows to keep her fucking mouth shut or she’ll be gutted as well.

Oh no, that’s merely a joke. Don’t worry about it, instead picture a girl made for the evening news, big doe eyes that get all shiny and glossy when the tears fill up, her trembling little chin warbling with each word, and her pretty hair the color of sun-burnt straw, in the right light, it’s like a waving field of wheat. It’s the perfect cover, because once the kid watches her parents, aunt and big sister take the plunge into the angry ocean, she knows how to lie to save her own life.

The sleeping pills helped too, admittedly.

Hey, it isn’t every day you watch dear old Mommy toss Daddy overboard. With a little help from Big Sis and Auntie as they pinned down Daddy Dearest, ignoring his screams for help, it’s the kind of damage that’ll shatter a kid’s psyche. An unfortunate aftereffect that’ll keep future psychiatrists in business for years.

Did he mention that this precious girl is now an orphan? No other family to take her in, stranded all alone and miserable, it’ll churn Human Interest story after story on the local news and maybe even get a spot on the cable news. These evil sharks, won’t someone put a stop to them?

Ignore the blood on the deck, the police report that notes an unidentified odor that smelled sharply of _something_ (briny and ancient and wrong) and that there is the strange insistence of the girl in her early account that her family had been _taken_. By doing that, the journalists have themselves a tragic accident, one they can lament about while showing the photogenic adorable little survivor, their very own mascot of emotional context.

It’s the best kind of trick to play - to have gotten away with murder on a jaunty inflatable boat. He remembers how his outboard motor had cut a wide swath into the ocean’s surface much like how the knife had opened up the father. Yes, his soul in exchange for real power, for _eternal_ power, it’s a fine deal to make.

*

 _Tower Hotel, Miami Florida_

Dean opens his eyes to the lazy dance of silvered white dust motes. There’s a slant of sunlight poking around the edges of the print curtains. It’s not a pleasant sight to wake up to: the faded yellow of cheap mustard and the stomach-turning green that reminds Dean faintly of Sam’s hangover pallor back in Cornwall. Only it’s not as disgusting, just palm trees stuck in a mustard wasteland, yep, that’s exactly what it is.

Welcome to Goddamn Miami.

“ _Bienvenido a Miami_ ,” chirps the local news station, the shot focusing on an amateur anchorwoman (with damn nice _assets_ ). It’s a kid’s style show, he realizes soon enough, what with the pan to her co-anchor, a bad knockoff of some kind of Sesame Street-style critter. Poor bastard, having to wear that godawful getup. “ _Bueno dìas_ , Eduardo.”

“It’s too early in the morning for freaking Muppets,” he declares and if it’s half-choked with a groggy _why the hell am I awake at this hour_ whine, Sam better not comment on it because it’s way too fucking early to get riled up. He doesn’t ever _whine_ , okay?

Damn, he needs to brush his teeth. Runs his tongue over his incisors and nearly gags at the gross fuzzy film taking up occupancy.

Hell of a way to wake up for another bright and sunny day in freaking Florida. At least, Dean assumes it’s warm out there because he’s fucking freezing to death, the air conditioner set to “ice box” which’ll do a number on ya when you’ve dropped off to sleep in just a t-shirt and boxer-briefs.

Unlike Sam apparently, who’s looking pretty goddamn chipper, as chipper as a person can look when scrolling for more information about freakin’ murders on the wonderful world wide web. He’s layered up already with his hooded sweatshirt zipped all the way up, his feet clad in his thickest pair of socks.

“Christ, Sam,” he moans, and shit, he needs an injection or ten of coffee directly in his bloodstream. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“No, I’m going to cryogenically freeze you,” Sam answers. He doesn’t give Dean any time to consider a situation where Dean wakes up in a distant future after being frozen. Where he’s the last living human male in a post-Apocalypse world, where chicks’ll line up just to have a hell of time, and where it rains doughnuts every night (just like on _The Simpsons_ that one time). Nope, because he’s _Sam_ , annoying little brother extraordinaire, he says with infinite patience _not_ teeming in his voice, “The A/C temperature control broke at some point in the night. I know better not to wake you when you’re muttering about...okay, I still don’t want to think about what you were mumbling in your sleep because your headspace is a scary place. It’s the air conditioner or the humidity outside, pick your poison.”

“Option number two sucks that much?”

“Dean, you should put your hand to the window.”

Lumbering out of bed, Dean makes his way to the window. Dean looks out of the window first, not an easy task when the window’s still so damn dusty and streaked so bad it looks like the last time it’d been cleaned was in the eighties, pastel colors galore and freaking _Miami Vice_ giving the illusion that this place _wasn’t_ some kind of hellhole. The glass has a look to it like it’s one bad storm away from shattering.

Out there is Miami, and even with the crappy view, he can still pick out the vibe of the city. Places are funny that way, always showing off their mettle with facades done up and run down over time.

Miami’s a people-less city, Dean can tell that much.

The well-to-do’s, those snobby bastards, make it a point of getting the fuck out of the heart of Miami to the friendlier neighborhoods of Coral Gables or the better parts of Miami Beach. The city’s been left to developers, but it’s too much construction and just too many damn buildings.

Its’ the emptiness more than anything that’s letting Miami go bad with a quickness. Not surprising when all the shiny buildings are only thirty percent occupied; too few people to keep the city alive with anything more than surface survival – pretty faces and a steaming underbelly. But it’s nothing like a dreamland detective backdrop. Nope, out here, where it’s freaking reality, it’s nothing like the movies. The real stuff, oh that’s always the bitch. It’s a city in need of a cure.

Still, there ain’t no place in Florida that’s free from the crazy, from the Scientologist stronghold in Clearwater (it had been the only time Dad refused to go on a hunt was when Caleb had brought up some nasty Spring-Heeled Jacks making their stomping grounds in Clearwater), to the towns teeming full of carnies or Irish travelers, to even freaking Orlando and the always expanding Disney empire, and finally, to anywhere and everywhere senior citizens have landed, snowbirds or not, waiting to die under the sun if the hurricanes don’t get ‘em. Not to mention the Everglades and the fact that Florida’s set to get swallowed by the ocean give or take a couple of generations.

Yeah, Dean ain’t fond of Florida by a long shot.

“Dean?”

“Yeah, coffee would be a great idea.”

“What?”

“That’s called a hint.” Dean puts his hand to the window pane and almost recoils in shock. “Fuck, it’s hot.”

“The weather’s supposed to be ninety-five today and it’s crazy humid. Strange weather patterns,” Sam hmms.

A minute ticks by; Dean’s brain needs a fucking jumpstart _like crazy_. “You thinking it’s a part of what we’re hunting?”

“Wow, you really need that coffee, huh?”

Dean convinces himself that whapping Sam across the head won’t do any good beyond boosting his spirits for a brief moment. It’s the caffeine withdrawal. Or it’s the creepy-crawlies working under his skin that Dean _ain’t_ mentioning to Sam, the ones that have gnawed in him ever since he fucking woke up with that breathing tube shoved down his throat, knowing it had been _wrong_. He’s trying to make his peace with it, at least for Sammy’s sake.

“I’m gonna take a shower. If some coffee magically appears in the time it takes for me to shower and shave, I’ll get you the thing you’ve wanted all your life.”

“And what’s that?” Sam asks, disbelieving, closing his laptop.

“Your very own pony. It’ll be a huge fucking Clydesdale pony, but it’ll be all for you, Sammy.” It’s a pretty hilarious mental picture so Dean can’t help it when he full out laughs.

“Dude, you’re losing it. Coffee it is.” Sam picks up the keys from the table, pausing for a moment before he takes off his sweatshirt and pulls on his sneakers.

“I don’t want anything ending in a ‘chino, ‘esso, or ‘atte.” Sam’s hand is on the doorknob when Dean stresses, “ _Offee_ as in coffee. That’s all I need.”

Sam’s shoulders slouch down, an irritated sigh, as though he’s really being tested today. He says as he turns around, “I forget to say no shot of hazelnut syrup _once_.”

“Yeah, it sucks. Deal.” Dean wags a finger at Sam, easier said than done as he’s still tearing through his duffel for some clean(ish) clothes. “I’m not getting whammied with that crap ever again.”

“Black coffee. I’ll write it down on my hand so I don’t forget.” Waves his right hand at Dean, palm so freakin’ clean, Dean thinks that Sam must’ve picked up antibacterial soap at a convenience store.

Or the freak’s been getting freaky with his hand all over again. But before Dean can make his awesome masturbation joke, Sam’s gone, locking the door behind him.

It’s rare to catch a break and yeah, it’s a small favor, but that don’t mean that Dean doesn’t mutter _thank you_ under his breath when the water’s mercifully hot but doesn’t scald his back. There’s no complimentary bottles of shampoo so Dean makes due with Sam’s stuff that he left on the inset soap deck, after a cursory sniff of the stuff because if it winds up smelling like flowers or Nair, he’d rather just wash off with the sliver thin pieces of complimentary soap.

He shaves after the shower, making quick work of it so it’ll be a five o’clock shadow by midday. They do have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for their _jobs_ today, after all.

Sam’s back with the coffee just when Dean’s set to start shorting Sam’s sheets. Evil mission forgotten, he says, sincerely, “Bless you, Sam,” pulling off the lid and taking a sip of the blessed black coffee.

“Your communion wafer,” Sam replies, handing Dean some sort of pastry twisted into a pretzel shape.

“Okay,” Dean manages, his mouth full of pastry, thickly swallowing, “I’m ready to take on my man Harrison’s famous Agent role. You ready to take on his breakout starring role?”  



	2. Some Dude Called Máximo Gómez and Other Unusual Suspects

  
_Home of Félix and Carmen Guerra, Miami, Florida  
Present Day_

It had been too damn easy, sauntering into the foster-parent’s home (Dean isn’t too clear on the details, apparently the girl’s in the process of being adopted by distant in-laws or something), all it takes is a flash of a badge and they’re golden. Trouble is that it’s the rest of it that ain’t so easy, because the survivor of the first set of murders is pretty much clamming up, not surprising, considering she’s all of thirteen years old and has seen shit that no kid has a right to see.

She’s got a real name but Dean’ll call her Straw Hair Girl until she stops flinching every time she as much as glances in Dean’s general direction. She’d been cool when they’d first taken a seat in the dining room, an impromptu and unfortunate investigation room, but the moment she’d locked onto his face, she’d just shut down, refusing to even say hell back to him.

He raises an eyebrow at Sam, not expecting anything more that Sam’s quick flash of exasperation for Dean being so _unsympathetic_.

“It’s been a trying time,” the social worker offers to Dean and Sam, eager to suck up to actual federal agents. Whispering to Dean, her eyes nearly crinkling with excitement, “You think it’s a serial killer? Any leads?”

God, the people the government hires. They’re all whacked out of their skulls.

“It’s a shame about her family,” Dean says, letting an undercurrent of _watch your fucking mouth_ fly loose.

And for once a person actually takes the goddamn hint from Dean.

Sam’s taking his usual role as the giant oversized puppy to the max, using soothing words and apologizing for having to speak to her at such a difficult time. “But you don’t have to worry. Just tell us what you saw. That’s it.”

“She doesn’t have to worry because she’s given five interviews to the news about this already,” the social worker, _Marissa_ , informs them. “Right, honey?”

Straw Hair nods once. Dean realizes she’s trying to peer at him out of the corner of her sight but she’s failing badly at being subtle about it. _What the hell is going on?_

“Agent Sol,” Dean says, dropping the _o_ before Marissa recognizes that they’re F.B.I. agents named after one Mr. Harrison Ford. She’d taken a quick look at their badges but probably didn’t make out the names since there’s already been so many freakin’ people making it a point to interview the poor kid. Dean could have walked in, saying, _Call me, Elvis_ and she’d still be fawning over them, a big case like this, with tons of media attention? Yeah, people just love the goddamn spotlight.

Dean repeats Sam’s fake identity again, this time getting Sam’s attention. “You think it would be better for me to leave?”

Sam spares him a quick look before he returns all his focus on Straw Hair. “No, Agent _Ryan_ , I think you can stay. Maybe Elena has something to say to you.”

Nervous eyes, the color’s more like a tree trunk slicked with rainwater, a kind of wet brown that’s unsettling, flick back and forth between Sam and Dean. She shakes her head, a sullen _no_.

There’s gentle prodding and then there’s this, a futile attempt at getting answers. No conversation is needed between Sam and Dean to end the interview. They close it out with the social worker oozing how she’s so sorry and she’s sure that tonight’s piece on _Sixty Minutes_ will be good.

“Elena spoke for a whole thirty minutes about what happened,” she says with disgusting enthusiasm, like this is such a _cool_ thing to happen, a little excitement spicing up her life.

“Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be groundbreaking,” Dean says.

Sam caps it off with a beautiful comment, something that damn near makes Dean punch a fist in the air for victory, “Another fine day for journalism.” Some folks think they can nail sarcasm but damn, Sammy _owns_ it when he puts his mind to it.

‘Course Marissa doesn’t get the hint and they leave with more questions than when they’d walked into the house.

“I’m thinking we need to check out what Marcos Flores has to say.” Dean puts the key in the ignition, grunting when the car’s fans push out warm air instead of the expected cool. Another thing to put on his to-do list and with their luck, they’ll wind up working the next job someplace cold and the heater will go on the fritz. He pats the dash of his car, comforting her, as though she can read his mind. Hey, stranger things have happened and Dean’s seen most of ‘em.

“We already have a ‘tentative appointment,’” Sam says, careful quotation marks surrounding the words. “His assistant’s been fielding most calls and said he’d have time in the late afternoon to meet with us.”

“Which ‘us’ are we gonna be?”

Sam looks sideways at Dean. “Not FBI.”

*

 _Flores-Norwood Home, Miami Beach, Florida_

Marcos Flores turns out to be a whirlwind of personality. Despite the familiar haunted look of bereavement in his eyes, he doesn’t let that deter him from admiring Dean’s car, inquiring about so many parts that Sam’s sure he’s just making them up. That is until Sam looks to Dean for confirmation and shockingly sees the kind of glimmer in Dean’s eyes when a _girl_ is commenting on the Impala.

The car doesn’t even look that impressive in the afternoon, the sunlight slowly starting to lower as the time’s almost winding down on that period called _dusk_. But despite Sam’s lack of enthusiasm about the shop talk, Marcos has plenty to say on the history of Chevrolet, the beauty of Impalas from the sixties to the early seventies, actually _arguing_ about which year was Chevy’s finest.

Sam had expected Marcos to look older, but plastic surgery is almost a hobby to the wealthy residents of Miami, so that really shouldn’t surprise him all that much. He invites them into his home with a flourish, apologizing for his bad manners, politely saying how he’s never been a collector of cars, trying to be environmentally conscious, don’t you know, but there’s nothing finer than a big car lovingly crafted out of Detroit steel.

“Though we have a BMW,” Marcos confesses, waving in the direction of the discreet three car garage. He smiles his wrinkle-free face at Sam and Dean, and says, “So Agents Barett and Cochran, or can I just call you Sydney and Eddie?”

“I’m fine with Eddie,” Dean says, happy to wipe his boots on the mat when Marcos pointedly waves a hand at the _Bienvenido_ braided rug set before the threshold of the house. “You can call Agent Barett here Syd.”

“How…punk of you,” Marcos tells Sam after a very long and puzzled pause. He has to crane his head up just to look in the general vicinity of Sam’s face. Marcos is easily a foot shorter, though he’s built solid, which strangely works with his easy conversational nature. It’s like the weight of him makes his natural chattiness seem less affected as though he really _is_ interested in speaking with you. Must serve him well for all the charity work he does.

It’s strange to be in this house and be hit quite suddenly with the _wealth_ of this man. While it had been implied from outside – the traditional Floridian style of stucco and clean Mediterranean lines – there’s a subtle modesty outside that is completely absent indoors. It’s a cushy home, with its wide open rooms, scrupulously cleaned so that it looked more like a modern museum than anything else.

Considering that Googling about Marcos and the deceased Henry had led to tons of hits on society gossip pages, it isn’t all that shocking that this is the house of a pair of movers and shakers, but it’s still something else to be so visibly confronted by signs of real wealth. Marcos might be a Cuban civil rights leader but he knew how to work an image, how money buys respect. Sam had seen the children of those kind of people at Stanford, the wealthy elites, always so _entitled_ , but Marcos works it like any good businessman-slash-champion for societal causes.

According to Sam’s research, Marcos keeps himself on the guest lists to the big parties and specializes in throwing charity events which dazzle people into believing his spin and accidentally doing the right thing. It’s another form of lying and one that Sam could almost respect. That is, if he can get at least some of the truth out of him for _their_ line of work.

“So, I have two agents from the Fish and Wildlife Services in my home to assure me that an angry shark killed Henry.” Marcos makes a quiet kind of _tssking_ noise, as though he doesn’t buy their cover, but he shrugs. “The cost of bureaucracy: all these agencies and no one who has any answers. Or have the manatees evolved into killers?”

Dean politely laughs at that, happy to take a seat in the living room (or entertaining room, or whatever the space was called), with its huge modern couches and chairs that looked vaguely impossible to actually use as seats. Sam gingerly sits down next to Dean, warily noting that Marcos is still taking in the state of their suits, probably scrutinizing every detail.

Marcos is gentleman enough not to let it slip what his final estimations of Sam and Dean are, instead he sits down across from them, flashing a measured smile. He pops up just as soon as he looks comfortable, saying, “I didn’t offer any drinks, I apologize. Did you want anything?”

“Coffee would be great,” Dean enthuses, wisely ignoring Sam’s glare.

“I make an excellent _café con leche_ ,” Marcos says. And there’s sincerity enough in that to mean that he actually does make it as opposed to having a live-in cook prepare it. A tremble of a frown passes his face before he smoothes it again. Ah, so it’s a game face. “Care for the same or something else, Syd?”

“Coffee, uh, café, would be great,” Sam says. With Marcos out of the room, Sam has ample time to strangle Dean. But this type of place is probably hooked up with security cameras. “Dean, we need to get information here about Henry Norwood, not about cars.”

“Yeah, you’re always right. What we need is information about an angry manatee, hey, they’re the mermaids of the sea, aren’t they? Mermaids are close enough to Sirens anyways,” Dean says, his eyes alit with mockery. “Maybe your whacked-out theory is right.”

“We barely have anything else to go on right now.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Damn straight.” Picking up the pillow crammed up against his left side, Dean asks him, “And what the hell is this stuff on these pillows?”

“Ah, I’m afraid that these pillows are for decoration only,” Marcos says, entering with a rattan tray of colorful mugs. He sets it on the coffee table with an ease of a person well accustomed to giving many house parties but the celebration of the ritual has been drained out of it, justifiably so, considering the circumstances.

Pointing to the wooden rings linked in three uneven rows down the front of the pillow, he explains, “Something our interior designer convinced us to purchase. I never much cared for it, but, uh, Henry loved it. Loved. I shouldn’t be saying that.”

He hands a mug to Sam first, along with a real linen napkin, then to Dean. His own coffee, he lets stand, as though he’d just brought the three because that’s what he’s supposed to do.

“It’s perfectly understandable, Mr. Flores.”

“If I have the pleasure of calling you two by your first names, then I would insist you call me Marcos,” he gently corrects. “The only person I know of as Mr. Flores is my father and he’s been dead for twenty years.”

“Marcos,” Sam says, keeping his tone as sincere as possible while Dean is happily drinking the coffee, making an approving sound in his throat in between sips, “I know this is a difficult time, but our office has disagreed with the Coast Guard regarding the attack of Mr. Henry Norwood. The police reports indicate that you did not agree that this was an animal attack or an unfortunate drowning. With the past accidents, we just want to make sure that every avenue has been examined.”

Sam’s about to get into the rest of Fish and Wildlife spiel, everything he could glean from a crash course in the history of the Department, but Dean beats him to the punch.

“We don’t think it was a shark but maybe another kind of species.”

There’s a quick tell, a worried look that Marcos smothers with a disbelieving laugh, “Some kind of new violent fish?”

“The attack was unusual. We’re trying to confirm behavioral patterns of the possible animal involved, because we do think that there’s more than just a theory that these attacks are related to a new vicious species.”

It’s the enthusiasm when it comes down to it, that’s how Sam makes these lies work. Slipping on the persona of a person who, when ticking off career choices in the guidance counselor’s office, decided that they wanted to work their way up the civil service ladder. A person who seriously thought that by watching after the local fish and wildlife population, squelching around in muddy places to check after these animals, they’d be doing something good, something _honorable_ , for their country.

Sam watches Marcos’s face carefully, but all he sees there is a weary composure, and perhaps, a little bit of guarded hope, a tension line around the left eye that might one day work itself into a wrinkle. That’s not what he expected to happen when he offered up the animal attack theory. Going in for the rest of the lie, “This hasn’t been officially stated—”

“And we’re not officially saying anything either,” Dean supplies, figuring out where Sam’s going. He offers an easygoing smile, but this is not a game of good cop, bad cop, this is an entirely different kind of game.

“But there have also been some carcasses of some big game fish and a few sharks that have been discovered,” Sam says, the shape of the lie comfortable in his mouth. “These remains aren’t as well preserved, as you can imagine, but they do have enough similar details that our agency must assume that these are all related, that Mr. Norwood’s death was indeed the result of an animal attack unless proven otherwise.”

Scratching at the edge of his right jaw, Marcos closes his eyes. The years that weren’t evident on his face beforehand come back with a vengeance, his skin almost taking on a grey pallor. “That would be better than the alternative.”

Sam pauses and Dean jumps in with the question.

“Which is what?”

Marcos looks sharply at Dean, in a hard stare that shouldn’t be possible. All those years that have been surgically masked bleed through and while he doesn’t look _frail_ , he does look pained, the kind of pain that’s too raw, a cumbersome thing that has unsettled the natural balances – that unfortunate medium between joy and sorrow.

“Suicide.” Marcos disrupts his hair’s carefully tousled shape; silvery strands now visible in the dark brown at the very top of his head. His voice has gone tight, the precise voice of someone who has refused to accept this though he has dreaded it all along, “He went out in the middle of the night on a boat that we didn’t have the heart to sell or toss out. We’ve been together for sixteen years and that stupid boat… it was something that we had when we could barely afford a condo on the waterfront. A souvenir, that’s all it was, something we couldn’t lose. Like it was a damn love letter or a keepsake, not something better left to rot away in a boatyard.”

He sets down his mug, eyes darting between Sam and Dean, but he’s not _looking_ at them at all, his mind too occupied with the past. “You know, for all that I’ve always had _something_ to say, this is the first time that words don’t help. I can tell you that Henry was never spontaneous, I mean, I loved him for it, but he needed to have things just so. Every other week he’d treat himself to one of those shaves with a straight razor at the barbershop in Little Havana. _Nene’s Barber Shop_. So old-fashioned, but he insisted that it was a tradition and he’d never give up on traditions. Every little thing, you see it all. Sixteen years. Why couldn’t I see this?”

Sam gets up from the ridiculous couch, kneeling down beside Marcos so that he can look him in his eyes, “Had Henry gone out fishing or boating before that night? Did he seem distracted?”

A bitter laugh, the kind that could strip a spring flower of its early petals, comes out of Marcos’s mouth before he tamps his lips together fiercely, swallowing back something just as bitter. “ _A day without distraction was a day wasted_. That’s what he always said. I’ve already told the police that he hadn’t been sleeping well, he was never a sound sleeper, but he’d started to call out a name in his sleep.”

“What name?” Sam can tell that Dean’s perched on the edge of his seat, recognizing this familiar moment. A break in the case.

Marcos hesitates for a minute, the room going so quiet that the tick of the modern grandfather-style clock in the foyer can be heard ticking, hands going round and round.

“ _Yemaya_.” There’s a strange tremble of Marcos’s lip when he says it, like it’s something that embarrasses him. It’s a lie but it’s a reckless one, there’s a look of defeat too, one that Marcos tries like hell to cover up but it’s futile. “Or maybe it was _Y Maya_. But that doesn’t make any sense. Henry would never go to that type of place.”

“What sort of place?”

Sharp eyes flick between Dean and Sam, before Marcos addresses the air, his eyes half-lidded, “ _Flores Y Maya Botánica_. Everyone calls it Y Maya, if they call it anything. It’s my mother’s business. She’s been running it since my father passed away. I doubt that helps you, Agents.”

“Oh, you never know,” Dean says lightly. He taps the side of the mug, “This was great.”

“Family recipe,” Marcos says, his pride subdued, but his well-mannered hosting skills bleed through. Continuing, he says, “The police didn’t care about what Henry said, only that he’d shown signs of...you know. _Obvious distress_.”

“We like to be thorough,” Sam offers. Putting a hand on Marcos’s shoulder, Sam says, “I hope we can discover what’s responsible for this.”

Marcos offers the first real smile, probably the one that’s made him the civil rights heavyweight he’s known to be, saying quite sincerely, “I have no doubt that someone will discover what happened to my Henry.”

As Sam and Dean leave, the night well on its way, Sam’s the one who speaks first as they walk across the courtyard to the car, “He lied about what Henry was saying in his sleep.”

“Well, he’s into politics, ain’t he?” Dean’s already tugging off his tie, if they don’t get in the car soon enough he’ll start taking off his jacket and start rolling up his sleeves. “Nice guy and he’s still grieving, but he’s gonna lie his ass off, even if we’d’ve asked him what’s his favorite color.”

Sam pauses just before he opens the car door, looking across the hood at Dean, wanting Dean to realize that there’s something _off_ about how easily Marcos gave up the information about that _botánica_. “You know, some Cubans practice Santeria.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Of course. Occult practices in Florida.” Dean bites his tongue on the rest of the vitriol he’d like to say about Florida, probably saving it when they uncover the rest of what’s going on, because Sam’s sure it’ll warrant plenty of understandable abuse.

Because if someone’s invoking a monster to kill off specific people, they’ve got their work cut out for them.

*

 _The Breakers Resort, Miami Beach, Florida  
Two Days Ago_

"Cheryl Hernández." No, she still can't get her mouth around it, the twist of her mouth necessary, swallowing out the Ramirez that used to follow her first name. She'd toyed with Cheryl Ramirez-Hernández a week after the engagement but it never worked properly, so she happily took up the new surname and filled all the paperwork to end the story of Cheryl Ramirez: she was married, the end. The five wasted years of Cheryl Ramirez-Castro, a hyphen destined to fail (not to mention a surname that always caused a double-take), can be ignored.

It's just new, that's what it is. That’s why this name doesn't fit her.

Rob is a wonderful man and she's sure that second time's the charm. A year long engagement, lavish wedding at the Oheka Castle on Long Island and a three-week long honeymoon in the Bahamas, and ending the trip in Rob's hometown, Miami. Which, honestly she doesn't mind it too much even though Rob's family never managed to leave their woes in Cuba.

Rob's mother, in particular, has been quite vocal of her distain of Rob marrying a Cuban woman who barely speaks their language and had been _divorced_. Of all the things to find fault in, that seemed to be the biggest scandal. That small-mindedness is almost charming but Cheryl wouldn't dare say such a thing to Rob, not here, where he's _Roberto_ and he speaks rapid-fire Spanish to all his relatives, a huge family that was once far larger. Some of his uncles and aunts and their children couldn't afford to leave Cuba after the revolution, they’re still stuck there, waiting. Waiting for another revolution apparently.

Cheryl doesn't have quite that story, that history that mixes the bitterness with the sweet nostalgia. Both her mother and her father have a couple of generations over the Hernández family in American citizenship.

Yet when she tries to reconcile the two Robs she now has seen, she cannot understand why he’s so different. There’s the Rob of Manhattan, the slightly atypical Wall Street analyst who prefers to spend a Saturday relaxing at the Cloisters with her by his side and a Sunday spent doing the crossword puzzle stretched out on a blanket at Sheep Meadow in Central Park.

This new Rob, the Rob of Miami, is a different breed, but so very similar. He’s still her husband, the one who insisted they get the oceanfront suite at the Breakers but he’s also a stranger, begging off all her desires to go to the latest hot spots of Miami Beach so he can spend more time visiting friends and family living in Little Havana. _Still_ living in Little Havana, not even spreading out to one of the nicer suburbs, those are the kind of people he grew up with, stuck in the past, a past she doesn’t believe in.

 _I never need to come to Miami again_ , she thinks, taking off her wedding band and engagement ring, moving them around on her other fingers, the feel of them still too new. The hotel's beautiful and Miami Beach is a lovely expanse of sand, all golden-white and dazzling even at night.

Almost makes a day spent out in the sun worth it although she hasn’t tested the waters. She really should sign up at the exclusive club that has an indoor pool. Swimming would be a good addition to the rest of her fitness regime during the worst part of a New York City summer.

“Thinking of taking a dip?” Rob asks, announcing his presence in the sitting room as he does regardless of the situation: always managing to touch on her thoughts. She smiles, tilting her head to receive his kiss. His mouth is rum-soaked, too much for her liking but she keeps an even face when he breaks away.

“Who needed to see Roberto?”

A flicker of a frown touches his lips. Cheryl notices the familiar scrunch of his brows that ages him more than his thirty-three years – it’s something he does when he has too many things occupying his mind. Rob scratches the back of his neck. His hair doesn’t move as he had it buzzed short at a barbershop. _A friend of the family_ , he had explained when she touched the new texture, rougher and slightly springy, _he used to cut my hair when I was a kid_.

“Do you need a fight, Cheryl?” He says this in his infinitely patient voice, the one that he uses when he’s drunk and too tired to make up excuses, waiting for her to say something that will lead her back in a full circle: apologizing for picking a fight on their honeymoon.

“No.” She tries for another entry, one that works on any Cuban boy raised right: guilt. “You haven’t taken me to the beach once since we’ve been here. My first time to Miami, baby.”

Cheryl steps in close to him, on tiptoes, the round curve of her slight belly pressing into Rob’s groin. Keeping her eyes half-lidded so he won’t see the gleam of triumph, he may be drunk, but he’s aware enough that he’s stirring in response. This is the very best part of a honeymoon: getting your way with sex negotiations.

His hands wander down her back but he pauses just above the curve of her ass, mind still too busy for her liking. “Really? You’d be willing to go now?”

“Now?” She laughs at that. “Honey, it’s past midnight.”

He sweeps her up in a kiss so different from all the kisses they’ve experienced since that first one, at a crowded bar in the West Village, their second date. _It’s Roberto’s kiss_ , she realizes when he breaks away, his breath hot on her face. “Cheryl-baby, let’s go swimming.”

Before she can protest, exclaiming that the only swimming she ever bothers with is relaxing in a large hot tub, going from one end to other, Rob dashes off to the bedroom. She watches him paw through his suitcase as she leans against the doorjamb, now setting her rings on her pinky fingers, keeping them from falling off by clutching her hands closed.

Waving his swim trunks at her, like he’s signaling her to move from her stock-still position, Rob says, “Come on, baby, _we vámonos_.”

She can’t help laugh despite the tension knotted in her stomach. She’d said that once, impatient to get to the Lincoln Center on time, and he’d thought it was hilarious; his white bread little _mamacita_ didn’t know the right way to tell him to hurry.

“My bathing suits are being laundered.” She settles her rings back to the proper place, adjusting them until the diamonds align properly. “I won’t have them until tomorrow morning.”

He kisses away her smirk. “Don’t need it, baby.”

Giggling like she’s the one who’s romanced a bottle of rum, Cheryl grabs Rob’s trunks. “If I’m not wearing anything, then you’re not.”

He chases her, out of their hotel room, in the corridor, catching her just as she gets to the elevator, kissing her until she has to break away if only to catch her breath. For all that they’ve done, they’ve not had sex in an elevator and unfortunately it moves too fast for them to even get to a point where they’re close to behaving inappropriately. Their touching is almost _decent_. They are newlyweds after all, the boundaries are a little bit wider and they’re still fully clothed by the time the elevator doors open up to the lobby.

There’s no way she’s ruining her Ferragamos by getting sand all over them, so she deposits them behind a potted palm tree, a discreet hiding place, but a temporary one at best.

Rob is happy to carry her, joking how this is another tradition of marriage, the first time the husband carries his lazy wife to the beach until she can stick her tender feet in the sand. He lets her down with a flourish, another lazy rum-soaked kiss to let her know it’s a joke, telling her to wiggle her toes. It’s not as cool as she expected it to be at this time of night.

Rob balls his button-down in his hands, throwing his shirt in the sand – gauntlets have been thrown with less force. Strips off his belt and lets it drop like it’s a broken seashell, far more deserving to get lost in the sand to be uncovered by enterprising children designing their makeshift sandcastles.

It’s not just any belt; it’s the custom alligator belt she bought for Rob’s thirty-second birthday. A replacement, that’s what it is, for the worn and nearly disintegrating old belt that Rob had kept, precious memento of his grandfather. When the tarnished belt buckle had finally ripped into the old skin, she’d spent hours making sure that the belt-maker could make an exact replica. Rob had said then, amazed, that he’d loved it, loved _her_ and they were engaged in less than three weeks.

Every detail’s perfect, even the weird little grooves on the inside of the belt, ones that neither she nor the restorer could figure out.

The hurt hits her where she’s buried her insecurity, a deep place where she rarely treads, preferring the happier future that she’s been so sure of just hours ago. Before Miami.

But Cheryl doesn’t say anything. He turns to her, asking, “Baby, you afraid to skinny-dip?”

She wrinkles her forehead, knowing that it does no favors to the premature wrinkles she’s supposed to be avoiding. If soaking up the rays and having facial expressions are going to ruin her face that much, then she’ll take the risk and get the Botox later.

“Aren’t there warnings about swimming this late at night?” She pointedly does not add that she doesn’t swim, a fact that Rob has oddly forgotten.

“Cherry, are you nervous? Don’t be,” he says as he shucks off pants and Jockeys. “I’ll keep you safe from all the hungry sharks.”

He chuckles and she begs off when he tries to hug her. “Robert, that’s not _funny_.”

He lands a sloppy kiss on her cheek (too wet for any reasonable person’s liking) when he stumbles into her. His fingertips, dusted with a fine coat of sand, brush the exposed skin of her back and she feels a knot of worry loosen.

“I’ll keep you safe,” he repeats, wisely omitting his bad joke.

She wishes she had something to drink beforehand. “Okay, but not too far. Are the currents strong?”

“You’re stronger. We won’t go too far.” He’s wheedling now, pulling her shirt up and over her head, his eyes dark. There’s a glint of soberness to them that she hadn’t seen before.

“Okay.”

It’s a huge dark thing, these waves smashing onto the shore, never ceasing, and she doesn’t know what else to do but to follow Rob as he continues in, only stopping when the water’s up to his knees. The water hits her mid-thigh when she stands next to him. He’s staring out at a point she cannot see, something that curves over the horizon maybe, a point of light that she can’t reach (damn laser-eye surgery never quite got her to 20/20).

“I’ve heard her since we landed at the airport,” Rob confesses, his voice suddenly softer than she’s ever heard it, a timber that he’s not even used during lovemaking. “Calling for me.”

Ice touches her belly, no, it’s just a wave hitting higher than she anticipated. “What are you talking about?”

He doesn’t answer, just goes out further in the water. “It’s a dream,” he says and she has to struggle to make out the words so she treads closer to him. The water’s to her shoulders but it hits her chin as the waves gently bend and roll, the surface of the water ceaseless in its motions.

“Rob, answer me.”

He comes closer to her and the moonlight hits his face just right and it’s like she’s standing on the street corner again, seeing him _looking_ at her and that’s when she knew that she’d fall for him, that he’d just have to ask her and she’d always say _yes_.

“I didn’t believe it, that it could be her, calling for _me_ but it has to be her. I love you, I always will,” his hands are suddenly on her shoulders, pushing her down, she can’t find purchase in the sand, “so please don’t scream.”

Rob’s not that much bigger than her, five inches taller and she’s only 5’3” on a big hair day. He’s narrowly built like the men of his family, a manly kind of fragility that she always found endearing. But here, he knows what he’s doing and for all her resistance, she can’t stop him.

Cheryl has always prided herself on her legs, athletic but not obviously muscled, but in the water, she’s at a loss. Doesn’t realize that he’s been pulling her towards the edge of the shelf until she struggles for footing, splashing at him and suddenly she can feel the cold lancing up her toes, to her feet, and zipping upwards. A cold of deepness and unending. The ocean.

His grip on her body is fierce and he’s an excellent swimmer, able to keep her from getting back on the shelf while not letting her scream for help.

Something _tugs_ on the bottom of her foot and it’s too much like _Jaws_ , that stupid movie that she never feared, it was all so _fake_ but it doesn’t feel like teeth at all. Wet cords snaking up her leg and Rob’s saying something, something to her and God, she prays it isn’t _I love you, I love you_ , she can’t _listen_ to that lie.

Then he just lets her go and she isn’t moving, the tentacle (oh God, she doesn’t want to know what it is, realizing it’s a _tentacle_ holding her still) has a fierce grip and the pain keeps her from screaming for help. Nothing but salt tears falling in the ocean.

“You’ll see her soon, Cheryl-baby.” He goes to say something else, another condescending, horrible twist of his insincere comfort, but he’s tugged underwater, the look of surprise almost, just almost, lets her forget about the pain.

Enough time to scream for help. No, that isn’t true. Enough time to get the shape of the word out, the first part, _he_ , but she’s dragged down before she can finish the word. _Help_.

It is darkness under the water, just darkness but there’s a spark of something and she comes across _her_.

A creature made of something _wrong_ , not animal enough and too _intelligent_. Almost human, but a monster, it stares at her and strikes out two sharp claws, jabbing into Cheryl’s eyes, the pressure ending with a faint pop. The bones are broken next, with exacting patience, delaying each break until she’s felt the extent of the pain before _new_ pain is introduced.

It takes a long time to drown, her body left to the whims of the undertow, moving this way and that.

Her last thought isn’t even hers. It is a voice of ancient hatred and madness, swearing to her that she has no need to worry, Rob will die above surface, _so it hurts more_.

The blackness that has been touching her mind finally swallows her whole.

*

 _Flores Y Maya Botánica Calle Ocho, Little Havana, Miami, Florida  
Present Day_

A night of research and a morning spent waiting for the store to open and Sam’s already impatient with the revelation of _three_ more mysterious deaths with a turnaround on the bodies a lot quicker than the others. It’s like whatever’s doing this is ratcheting up the body count and it has to mean _something_.

First it had been the reveal of the death of a local TV personality, a Yvette García, star of the popular children show _Noticias con Eva y Eduardo_ on the evening news, which Dean had noted by saying she’d been the one forced to do small talk with a dude in a giant Muppet get-up. Dean also had the very important point to make that she was way too hot to be working on a crap show like that, which Sam had thanked Dean for, because it’s always good to know that Dean ranked his Children’s TV stars by hotness factor.

Come to think of it, Dean probably did that even when he was a little kid and you know what? Sam doesn’t want to think about that, pushing it down where all weird Dean Facts go in his mind, a deep dark place with a very closeable lid.

This morning, the news was still all about Yvette, until a new story popped up. This one’s just as juicy, although not quite as perfectly photogenic: a couple, newlyweds apparently, found washed up on the private beach of The Breakers Resort.

With only a couple of hours to prepare, Sam’s mind has been overloaded too much information. Trying to figure out all the connections to all these _deaths_. Eyes taken, bodies crushed, the males in worse condition than the female victims.

Parking in front of the store, they stake out the place for a little while as it’s still too early for there to be customers milling around the aisles. As soon as the morning heat gets to be too much to handle, Sam and Dean enter the building, done in a pastel stucco façade, a Latino Heritage mural painted on the exposed left side.

The implication of _botanicals_ , something light and sweet, is not at all what Sam sees from the shopkeeper at the _Flores Y Maya Botánica_. She’s a very short woman, bent and rounded with so many years that it’s difficult to gage how old she actually is. Though her face is heavily wrinkled and looks more like a pale wood carving, the narrow look she gives Sam and Dean indicates there’s still an active mind. A very irritable mind, but it’s clear that she knows her stuff.

Fingertips tighten around her cane until her knuckles whiten. She says before Sam can introduce himself, “No hablo inglés.”

A quick cursory scan of the labels of cure-alls and _medicine_ on the shelves reveals the bilingual nature of the store (as well as several shelves dedicated to the touristy tchotchkes that non-Cubans would be happy to purchase) but Sam gives her the benefit of the doubt despite the little quirk of her thin mouth that suggests otherwise.

“Your son, Mrs. Flores, said that you never worked the store alone.” Not true, but he may as will give it a shot. “Is there _alguien más_ here? Someone we can speak to that speaks English? _¿Alguien más que hable inglés?_ ”

She points to Dean.

“Oh, she’s hilarious,” Dean says, putting down a bottle of cologne that Sam really hopes isn’t in honor of Eleggua, even though that seems to be what the bottle is advertising, because he doesn’t want to think what they put in that for the god of the rock hard...dick.

“Dean,” Sam says, a low warning.

“Dean,” Mrs. Flores repeats, hitting the consonants in his name hard, as though she’s testing the name and has already decided that she doesn’t trust him. But then she smiles, so maybe Sam’s failed at reading her or she’s completely enigmatic.

Or Dean’s charm works on women of all ages.

“Dude, she’s faking.” Dean picks up a yellow candle, checking the handwritten price on the tiny sticker. “Her son’s fluent in English and she’s been in the country since she was barely legal. Use your head. And your Spanish sucks.”

Giving Mrs. Flores a quick apologetic look, Sam turns around, taking the candle out of Dean’s hands. “How the hell would you know? You can barely compliment a girl without screwing up a verb tense.”

“Hey,” he protests weakly, “I do _fine_ , man, so they must be digging something. Didn’t you notice her wincing when you were butchering those words?”

“Dean—”

Dropping his voice so low that Sam has to lean in to hear him, Dean says, “C’mon, she’s _Cuban_ , they’re freakin’ proud. Let’s not piss her off.”

“What? But manhandling the store merchandise is okay?” Sam punctuates this by giving Dean an example of how to put things back where they belong – setting down the candle so it doesn’t look like it had been touched at all.

Sam’s not a neat freak, despite what Dean might think, but he is tasked with dealing with a brother who embraces the slovenly lifestyle with a kind of peculiar zest that Sam still believes is Dean just screwing around, trying to drive Sam crazy. Trouble is, that it works, of course.

Dean looks around Sam (not easy when Sam is this close, he has to do a full body lean to get out of the Sam-zone), flashing a perfect toothpaste commercial smile at Mrs. Flores. Clapping Sam’s shoulder, he says real quick so only Sam’ll catch it, “Damn straight. That ain’t what’s making her cagey.”

“You are the first, yes? _Hermanos_.” Mrs. Flores’s English is worn and overly formal: the stiffness of someone who makes it a point never to converse in the language. “The first son.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sam here is my little brother. Human growth hormone,” he confides, “A shame what they put into food nowadays. I’d rather eat frijoles and arroz but he’s still a hamburger and fries kind of guy.”

Dean even clucks his tongue in disapproval. And nailed the fucking pronunciation.

It’s far too easy to switch between shooting Dean death glares to offering apologetic looks to Mrs. Flores as she peers up at him. She has to crane her neck quite a bit seeing as she barely hits five foot nothing in her orthopedic shoes.

“You know my son, yes?”

“And Henry Norwood,” Sam says, unsure of how to tread. Marcos Flores had spoken of his mother in a way that seemed that they got along okay but Marcos seemed to get along with anyone.

Dean had nearly gotten an open invite to a charity function for immigrant’s rights for God’s sake. Apparently it had been offered sometime in-between Dean and Marcos conversing about the Impala, which Sam had missed because he’d rather make up anagrams in his mind than listen to even _more_ shop talk about the car.

There’s a quick cluck of her tongue and she shakes her head. It doesn’t seem like disapproval. “A nice boy. Sick con _el nerviosismo_ every day,” she explains, taking careful steps back to the counter. She doesn’t tell Dean and Sam to stay where they are, so they follow her, Dean offering to help her up to the tall barstool-style chair behind the register. Murmuring her thanks, she turns to look Sam straight in the eye, “You wan’ more, yes?”

“Marcos doesn’t think Henry would’ve killed himself. I’m sorry for speaking to you at such a delicate time, but we wanted to know why Henry would be calling out the name of your store in his sleep.”

It’s direct enough that Mrs. Flores has to take a rattling breath, composing herself but she’s clearly rattled.

“My Marcos says that?”

Dean steps up to Mrs. Flores, nodding his head in confirmation. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Why would Henry do that, Mrs. Flores?”

“He comes here and say, _‘I want to be no more sick’_ but he won’t say to Marcos.” Mrs. Flores has given up on attempting to speak clearly, her voice clouded with pain. “ _‘Say no thing,’_ he says, an’ I say no thing. Now he’s dead. So, what? Do I tell Marcos so he comes here and he say, ‘it’s okay.’ No okay. _Not_ okay.”

“Mrs. Flores,” Sam says, hesitating to show his fake Miami P.D. license, because while Dean had taken the Don Johnson identification for himself, Sam’s ID was even more ridiculous. But he still flashes it despite mentally cursing Dean, saying, “We’re detectives with the police department. Did Henry Norwood tell you he was sick?”

She’d had her sharp eyes, bespectacled and everything, fixed on Sam’s identification for all of a half-second. Frowning, she asks, “Ron Butterfly?”

“It’s his middle name. I know, it’s silly. That I is for Irving.” Dean smiles at her and it is creepy that Dean can get that kind of a reaction out of a woman old enough to be like, their _great-grandmother_. “I’m Detective Johnson.”

“You ask his doctors?”

Sam had cracked into Henry Norwood’s files and things had come up clean, not even any signs that he’d ever had any mental illnesses. “Why would he go to you, Mrs. Flores? Perhaps he was keeping secrets even from his doctors?”

“Not _nerviosismo_ ,” she says, sadly. Clarifying, “His sickness. He’d go to Tampa, he say, a test, for his memory. He say to me, it’s bad. Ask me for help.”

“Memory loss?”

“He forgets. Some days. Didn’t wan’ anyone to know. I don’t forget. It’s a sickness for the old, for me, but I don’t get sick and he does.”

“Alzheimer’s?”

Mrs. Flores just nods. “I give him remedies.”

“Looks like they didn’t work,” Dean summarizes but his tone isn’t as blunt. If anything, it’s just tired.

“You’ve been running the store since your husband died?”

Mrs. Flores looks at Sam, startled. “Yes. Why you ask?”

“It’s a nice store,” Sam says, offhandedly. Slots away the information, like he’s shoving it in a pile marked _to be examined later_. “I’m sorry we had to come here under the circumstances. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Flores.”

Taking off, Dean’s right by Sam’s side, opening the door for Sam as they walk into the late morning-turning-high-noon heat.

“What was that all about?”

“You hungry?”

“Sam,” Dean says, not letting Sam get away with the evasion, “Come on.”

“We need to find out more information on those last people murdered.”

A puzzled frown passes over Dean’s face and he says, “I thought we did that already. Or do you want to pull out some wild speculation off that conspiracy theory website?”

“Dean, you know who _Yemaya_ is? In the Santeria faith, she’s a goddess, a _spirit_ , of the ocean.”

“Shit. You’re thinking that there’s some kind of summoning crap going on?” Dean starts pacing down the sidewalk, ignoring the car in favor of heading down to the closest restaurant that’s open for lunch.

“I think we need to figure this out without getting the runaround. And can you open the car so I can get my laptop?” Sam calls after Dean’s retreating form.

*

 _Exquisito Restaurant, Calle Ocho, Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

The croquettes are all-around excellent and the tostones were good when hot but now it’s like eating cold fries. Only it’s cold slices of fried plantains, so hey, a little variety never killed a guy.

Sam had cleared off the little appetizer plate of chorizo with slices of garlic before Dean had even had a shot at tasting pork heaven, something that honestly dripped orange-colored oil and made Sam almost tear up in how freakin’ excellent it tasted. Dean makes a note to himself _not_ to check out the waitress when she’s walking away while there’s hot food on the table. Sam may not embrace Dean’s “if you can eat it, put it in your mouth” motto, but he does move _fast_ when he’s hungry.

Dean hasn’t known heaven until the pork sandwich arrives, the aptly named Cuban. Pork, glorious artery-killing pork, flattened to perfection, with slices of cheese and a thin-pressed pickle, oozing with too much mustard, clearly if it’s one thing a Cuban should be known for, it’s this sandwich, screw the cigar.

It’s like there’s a party in his mouth and it’s doing the freaking _merengue_. Which is apparently the only kind of music that can be played at this place so he’s gonna drown it out in favor of enjoying the food over the ambience.

“So it’s a game of connect the dots and what do we got? That everyone who bought it was either Cuban or involved in the community, right?” Finishes off the first round of questioning by taking another bite of his sandwich, his mind betraying his overjoyed taste buds with curiosity about whether Sam’s chicken is any decent.

In response to that thought, Sam puts his free arm around his plate, as he continues checking sites on his laptop. That’s not his psychic powers coming into play, that’s just Sam being well-trained against patented Dean-theft of anything good on Sam’s plate.

“Miguel Díaz, a friend of Robert Hernández, one of the victims, said he’d met with Robert at a barbershop hours before Robert and Cheryl took their ill-fated midnight swim.”

“Dude, I hope you’re quoting an article, ‘cause that’s a little purple. The barbershop, is that the same one Marcos Flores mentioned?”

“Yeah.” Tap-tap, Sam’s right hand is busy doing his search and destroy thing, geekery at its finest.

“Okay, so back to Yemaya.” Another bite of Dean’s sandwich, a glorious moan of triumph that it still tastes so damn good before he continues, “She’s a water spirit, huh?”

“Not just any water spirit.” Sam turns the computer around, showing a series of images. Some of them are dark-skinned women in blue-and-white dresses, but other ones?

Freaking mermaids.

“Dad always suspected there was more to mermaids than just heat-stroked sailors mistaking manatees for sea-women,” Sam says.

“I don’t know, dude.” It’s just too much. _Mermaids_. They’re about twenty barrels full of monkeys funnier than vampires, and oh, that time with all the barrels of monkeys? Now _that_ had been a wild time.

“You got any better ideas, I’ll be happy to hear them. Because we’ve got Santeria or an angry mermaid on our hands and I think dealing with a sea goddess would probably be harder than taking out a Siren or a mermaid.”

Sam finishes this by tearing into his chicken and Dean sighs, knowing where this is going.

“So we gotta check out that barbershop, see if there’s anything funky going on there.”

“And figure out how to kill a mermaid or vanquish a spirit of the ocean.”

“You’re killing my food afterglow,” Dean weakly says. “So you know.”

“Yeah,” Sam’s poking his food, _playing_ with his food, a habit he never learned to drop, moving half-stripped chicken bones around his plate. “I know.”

*

 _Nene’s Barbershop, Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

To say his Spanish was shaky was to say that the tower at Pisa wasn’t all that straight.

 _“Mi hermano y me buscamos demonios. Tu visto algo, hombre?”_

Nah man, there’s no way in hell Dean’s saying anything close to that. He’s just gonna work on keeping the conversation tilted towards English.

Dean settles into the creaky old chair, the gaps in the vinyl covering have been covered over with grey electrical tape, and says in the best Spanish he can manage, for a little to be taken off.

The barber, an older man with grey hair on its way to white, had nodded in response to Dean’s crap Spanish when Dean had greeted the barber. His neatly trimmed mustache is still stark black, as are his bushy eyebrows, which is a little disconcerting, it’s like part of his face has decided not to age with the rest of his body.  
“Okay, okay,” the barber says, smiling fearlessly, showing off his wide gap-tooth smile. There’s an old fashioned thread-stitched name in blue on his front pocket, _Frank_ , which, okay then. Frank it is. He takes a comb out of the clear glass jar, shakes off the disinfectant water, and starts to examine the state of Dean’s hair.

Originally Sam was gonna join Dean in questioning the locals here but Sam suddenly backed out. It figures, the one time Dean can say one of his favorite Spanish phrases, an approximation of “take it all off,” (actually he knows both ways, the dirty one and the innocent-relating-to-hair way) _that’s_ when Sam bails, suddenly feeling that wonderful craving to tear into some books at the local library.

Dean’s had a theory that part of Sam’s amazing powers of bitchiness are maintained in the raggedy mess that Sam calls his hair, but Sam’s a hell of a lot smarter than Samson and Dean’s no Delilah.

Dean’s never the hot chick, okay?

The bells chime as two men walk in, younger than the barber though not by much. Their faces are so similar Dean almost mistakes them for twins, but there’s a taller one (by about two inches) and the shorter one. They’re wearing their hair just an inch too long and have rough stubble-beards on their faces. It’s the seventh-days-growth they both wear as beards that gives Dean a disconcerting image of his father, days into a hunt and having no time for anything but the damn hunt.

The tall one, possessing a weird scratchy voice, makes a comment to Frank the barber – a joke as both Frank and the short one (who’s got light brown eyes, almond-shaped when he isn’t fully squinting) laugh in response.

“Joe,” Frank says, waving a comb in the direction of the shorter guy, “ _Mira_ , you can’t stay out too late, Ana will start clawing down the street for you.”

His English’s a thousand times better than Dean’s Spanish and it’s an indication to the other guys, Joe and the comedian, that it’s better to speak English for the time being.

The comedian doesn’t give a shit apparently, because he makes another joke, something to do with dogs and fucking and Dean knows enough to laugh, making sure to keep his head even as Frank’s just started up his electric razor. Smooth buzzing of the back of Dean’s neck, a feather-light touch that’s damn impressive, as Frank does his thing.

“That guy,” Frank says, glancing briefly at Dean’s reflection in the mirror, “thinks he knows because he’s not married.”

“He’s still in love with a, _¿Cómo es?_ Mujer del Mar. Sirena.”

“Mermaid?” Dean forces a smile to hide the disbelief. If Sam’s original damn theory is right, after all, a Siren is just a mermaid without the damn tail, then he’s never going to hear the end of it.

“Mermaid, _sí_ ,” Joe confirms, settling down in the empty chair next to Dean, unfurling a Spanish language newspaper. As though imparting a great secret, Joe leans over slightly, opening his light brown eyes a little too wide for dramatic effect, he says, “Water’s no good for your brain.”

“Okay, okay,” Frank interrupts, stilling Dean’s head from turning any further. “You see this, boy? You get old, you start dreaming mermaids.”

“Don’t get old,” the Comedian informs him, speaking in English, horribly mangled. It’s like it’s his first shot at speaking English and the Comedian’s mouth puckers at the end of his sentence, like, sure he knows he fucked that up royally but are you gonna call him on it?

Dean’s not about to piss off any leads in this case, so he just raise his eyebrows, unable to nod, and says, “Amen.”

The door rings again as another man walks in, this one around Dean’s age, average height with a face that looks like this guy’s been in more than his fair share of fights and he’s always come out on the losing end.

He’s wearing an honest-to-god _fedora_ and if it weren’t for the tendrils of a tattoo crawling along the side of his neck, he’d look like he just time-traveled here from the Sixties.

“Manny, _cabrón_ , you break another wall with your face?” asks Joe. In the reflection of the mirror, Dean can see Manny scowl at that before Manny just shakes his head, sitting next to the Comedian in one of the cheap plastic lawn chairs arranged in front of the main window.

“Rodrigo,” Manny says to the Comedian, finally naming the funny guy. He say something else, but it’s quiet enough that only Rodrigo can hear it and all Rodrigo does in response is shake his head in disbelief.

“There, good, eh?”

It’s better than good, a neat clean cut with perfect lines and Dean tells Frank as much. Asks how much he owes and Frank helpfully points to the thumb-tacked price list.

“That’s real nice.” Dean goes for the push, saying, “Marcos said this was the best place for a haircut.”

“Marcos?” Frank frowns at Dean, his dark eyebrows flattening to a thick straight line mere centimeters above his eyes.

Manny says, slight edge to his voice, “There’s a lot of men called Marcos round here, man. You gotta narrow it down.”

“Flores.”

Joe laughs at that. “That _pendejo_? He wouldn’t step into here if he had to take a piss.”

“No man, he’d piss in the doorway,” Manny agrees, flash of sharp teeth. Okay, that’s interesting. Pillar of the community disliked by the little people. Now that’s a shocker. Manny looks at Dean, a kind of shark smile on his face, only more distorted, “You his new fucktoy now that Henry’s croaked and left poor Marcos with nothing but his money to keep him warm at night?”

“You sure know a lot about Marcos Flores,” Dean says, opting for the easy route as he gets out of the chair after Frank wipes off errant strands of hair off Dean’s t-shirt. Dean knows how to flash a smile of his own but he’ll save the fuck-off smiles for another time.

“Part of the hazards of the job. Him and his fucking house parties.” Dean isn’t sure what the hell Manny means by that, but whatever it is, everyone else seems to be following along, so Dean stays quiet. After a moment, Manny says, flippantly, “But hey, you’re cool with him, huh?”

“He was considering buying an Impala. I restore ‘em.”

“No shit? Man, that’s a sweet ride. I got a Monte Carlo, but she’s been giving me grief.” Manny blows it off, saying, “Well, he’s still a fucking _maricón_.”

“Hey,” Frank says, shaking a different disinfected comb, waving it over Joe’s head. “He gave back to the community. Henry Norwood helped us back when Hurricane Andrew hit. You’re not too young to remember that.”

“They don’t need to remember,” Rodrigo says in his mangled way, and it looks like all his jokes have left him, a haunted look in eyes.

Manny shakes his head. “Don’t matter, things are going to get better.”

“Oh yeah,” Joe says, with his easygoing laugh. “You know that?”

Dean smiles too, playing into the pretense by giving Frank a big tip even though it goes against his nature. Sam would be so proud.

“Oh, I’ve been hearing a lady singing all my troubles away,” and just before Dean thinks Manny’s quoting an unfamiliar song, he sees Rodrigo tense, suddenly standing up and making a terse excuse (in Spanish, naturally) as he heads out of the shop.

Before Rodrigo leaves out, Frank says to him, in Spanish, something about Manny dreaming about Rodrigo’s mermaid and maybe he should be jealous.

All Dean can think is _fuck_. Sam is right on.

Manny scowls with sudden realization, saying, “He still owes me fifty bucks.”

Joe says something in Spanish about a dude, Máximo Gómez, and Dean, sensing an exit, beats off a hasty retreat, only getting away with another sarcastic joke aimed at his expense from Manny. Nice to know that Manny think it’s goddamn hilarious that Dean must be Marcos Flores’s boy toy. Dammit. Why does the person he’s gotta save have to be a jackass?


	3. If You Hear the Mermaid Singing

  
_Tower Hotel, Miami, Florida  
Present Day_

Rustling of keys, jingling quick and a hard swift turning of the old lock, that’s all the warning Sam gets.

Dean announces, “I think I’ve found the next victim.”

He bursts into the room, not caring that Sam’s in the middle of getting dressed, his jeans barely over his ass. The ruined pair of pants tossed across his bed stands as a testament to the dangers of going to a library just past midday.

A bunch of schoolchildren had been ushered in for a special reading – and for some strange reason, the food and drink rules were lax, unheard of to Sam. Though noisy and distracting, Sam had thought that he’d have been able to manage to do his research in relative peace but the experience had proved to be a battle and the battlefield was strewn with little, little people, all apt _anklebiters_.

Sam had failed miserably in his careful attempts to walk around the munchkin children, perhaps too nervous of mistakenly _trodding_ on them. He’d wound up getting stained to high heaven in bright splashes of _juice_ (high fructose corn syrup), reds and purples that were never going to come out. He may as well turn his ruined jeans, once his favorite pair, into some kind of hippie tie-dyed outfit, for all that it’s worth now. Sam Winchester vs. Schoolchildren, 0 to 1. Only in Florida.

Zipping up his pants and then pulling his belt, mercifully free from fruit punch stains, through the denim loops, Sam asks, “But how can you be sure?”

“Dude, look, I know that this jerk’s the next one. You’re freakin’ right. It’s a damn mermaid or a Siren or whatever, and she’s been picking out her victims by singing or calling them somehow.”

“ _If you hear the mermaids singing_ ,” Sam muses. “It’s an old enough story, thing is, if it’s Yemaya, that means it’s a spirit being summoned and we’d have to counteract that by banishing her. And, uh, from what I can tell, she won’t be happy if we try to banish her. There are these other stories that make her sound almost like a protector, like she keeps the monsters ‘locked away in the deep,’ not like the Kraken, that’s a different folklore after all, but things like that.”

“Monsters of the deep.” Dean grunts, picking through his duffel bag, pulling out a clean shirt, faded grey, Sam thinks it was black once. As he swaps out his sweaty shirt for the new t-shirt, Dean mutters through cotton, “Damn, this is like a B-Movie, we’re not in a _Jaws_ knockoff at all. Maybe we’re in _Shark Attack 3_. That one sucked, I gotta tell you.”

Knowing Dean’s usual deflections when he’s anxious, Sam says, “You gotta give me something to work with, man. You got any information besides this guy’s name?”

“License plate,” Dean nods his head towards Sam’s laptop. “Do the hacker thing and crack into the DMV. I wasn’t able to get a bead on his house, I know he likes to go to strip clubs in the middle of the day, which, damn, _Mr. P’s Tail_ , that’s a _sad_ place to go looking for a little T and A. I hauled ass back here. Worse comes to worse, we need to gear up tonight and start hitting the beach.”

Dean’s eyes are bright and he’s got that scary enthused concentration tight on his face. It’s not just the thrill of a hunt – it’s the excitement of tackling a real monster, of being able to waste something that deserves killing. The lines have been getting too muddled lately. Admittedly, things have been turning too grey and confusing for even Sam’s liking.

And just like that, Sam gets distracted, thinks of what’s coming down the line for him, and that’s pointless, not now, _not now_ he chides himself. They’ve got bigger fish to fry.

God help him, he’s thinking in lame one-liners just like Dean.

Dean’s rambling, impatient to find out the where so he can start picking out the weapons that they’ll need to take. If they can stop this guy before he takes a midnight swim in the water, so much the better. “...And I heard one of these guys saying something about this guy called Máximo Gómez—”

“Dean!” A new piece of the puzzle slotting in, too bad it’s another piece of endless blue sky. “That’s a park. Not a _guy_.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Quick Google search, remembering when they’d passed by the park yesterday, Sam notes, “But it closes after six.”

Dean eyes his watch. “Five minutes to six on the freakin’ dot. Crap.”

Rapid-fire, this, exchanging _who, what, where_ , they didn’t grow up playing board games like _Clue_ , but they know how to play this: get all the information and hope to God that they can stop it before it’s too late. Ten minutes and the park’ll be completely empty, so Sam shoves it aside, it’s another avenue to explore later. Cracking into the DMV is a total cakewalk and he’s grateful for it.

Asks, “So what’s this guy’s name?”

“Manny.”

“That it?” Not the _name_ , no, Sam’s not asking about that. There’s something off, like Dean’s holding back. Sam scrubs his face with the heels of his hands, opening his laptop. Battery ’s running low, but that doesn’t worry him; recharge later, after he’s done breaking the law. As he pulls up the DMV website, he says, “Dean, we’ll find him.”

Dean says to him, more like he’s answering something else, “It’s a damn mermaid. _Siren_ or whatever and it’s picking off people like Miami’s a goddamn buffet, Sam. This is so freaking jacked up.”

“What else happened?” Sam knows that with Dean’s hackles raised like this, it means that there’s something more that stumbling across someone being lured by the creature. “Do you think it’s a trap or something?”

“I wish. A trap, that’ll be great, we’ve gotten out of worse scrapes.” Unspoken is how close all those times have been and there’s a memory of that first lurch of the semi hitting into the car, a memory that Sam’s pushed down deep, where it’s an almost-dream most days. Dean says, “We stop it tonight.”

It’s so strikingly Dad-like, that comment, Sam almost recoils. Instead he continues doing what he’s doing as he watches Dean load up his favorite pearl-handled gun, filling it with silver bullets.

“I haven’t figured out what kills a mermaid yet, Dean.”

Or how to take on something that might be wholly godlike, _Yemaya_ , but Sam doesn’t need to say that part aloud, Dean gets it. His answer is to tuck a knife in his left boot, quick shake of his head, _yeah I know, we’re flailing in the friggin’ wind right now_.

“So it’ll be field research if it comes to it. Best way to learn.” The bravado flickers off, just for a second, but Dean doesn’t let it stay long enough, a pretense he’s mastered since they were kids. “Would be great if we found this guy before it comes down to the wire. It’ll suck getting ground down to sea-bitch fish food if all we can do is piss her off.”

*

 _Lummus Park Beach, Miami, Florida_

Manny’s been hearing her singing for the past six nights and tonight’s his lucky night. He puts on the Panama hat, an heirloom from his granddaddy. It hides the dragon tattoo twisting around the base of his hairline: a poor decision made when he was seventeen and stupid.

He still shaves his head to a near buzz cut to let it show when he’s pissed off and wants to get a reaction from the few snotty millionaires awake in the predawn hours to watch their carefully separated trash get picked up. One of them once, one of those blonde tanned creatures that’s gone so plastic the only thing she can move realistically are her skinny over-exercised limbs, had shrieked and dropped her delicate china cup of coffee (the coffee stained her pristine white front porch) when he’d turned around and given her a glimpse of the dragon’s bloody claws.

They keep an eye on the sanitation workers, like, what, it’s every _poor_ person’s dream to steal out of the garbage of the wealthy? Whatever shit’s being tossed by those _pendejos_ , Manny has no need for it. His family may have always struggled but they’ve not turned into money-obsessed Americans.

He decides against the cross today, leaving it hanging on his closet door.

It’s always colder at the beach and tonight is no different. Maybe it is different, because it had been a day hot enough to cook eggs on the sidewalk, but he doesn’t think that there’s anything significant, it’s just the weather, yeah? No need to get freaked out about that stuff, all that global warming hysteria.

He shivers in his thin white button-down, teeth chattering as he looks out towards the water. It’s a long wait for the singing to start but when it does, he smiles.

It’s a crooked smile that isn’t improved thanks to the state of his nose, a mashed down triangle of flesh. He was once prominently hook-nosed but that ended about two years ago thanks to alcohol and hot tempers. When he smiles, it looks like a threat and it’s been useful more times he can count but he never manages to work his way past a grimace into happier expressions.

He knows it’s a woman, knows it more than anything he’s ever known. As she approaches, all these little fears start beading out of his skin, forming into cold sweat in his palms and at his temples. He mouths, wordlessly, the song he knows she’s singing just for him, aching to see her surface out of the water, this beautiful woman who’s promising him the world.

No more pain, ever. Memories sloughing away like rotting skin. Dropping out of school ‘cause those bitches don’t know the damn world and fuck ‘em, he knows what he needs to. His mother’s bitter words when he admitted he may have knocked up a sixteen year old girl and here he was nineteen and he should’ve known better (and it was just a scare, but scare enough for him to stay the fuck away from high school girls and always remember the fucking condom). The shame bearing down on him like a weight when he missed his grandmother’s funeral because he was too fucked up to manage anything but getting more drugs in him any way it could go. All this and more builds up like a crescendo, like a wave, like absolution, and he can see far off the gleaming shape of _something_ —

Then these two white boys come tearing across the sand, making damn fools of themselves, shouting useless things like “Stop!” and “Get away from the water!”

What the hell do they know? He’s not even got his feet wet; he made sure to wait at the edge, just where the sand gets lapped by the ocean, damn near weak puddles of frothy water collapsing into the sand before his feet.

He goes to tell these idiots this but the wave hits him full-force, knocking him down and before he has the presence of mind to dig his hands deep into the sand, something twists around his leg, tugging him hard.

All he can do is break the surface, once, long enough to suck in air and see the two men as they try to reach him. They’re carrying guns and all Manny can think is that these are _dangerous_ people yet they are unable to do anything but watch.

Watch him _die_.

Manny thinks, bizarrely, of his grandfather, hunched over his precious chess set, bony elbows poking out at the sides of the small table, saying, “ _Mijo_ , there’s no moves to make that’ll let you win.”

Then the pain lances up his legs, sharp and swift, easily cutting through his jeans. It slides into his skin, these needles, _her_ needles, sinking into his flesh.

He’s yanked back under without preamble, without another moment to _think_ and he comes face to face with the lady who’s been calling for him, the one he believed had all the answers he’s been too fucked up to figure out on his own.

She asks, pulling him through her not-so-tender hooks, if she’s worth the wait.

He’d be bloody all over if she let him die on land. Here, in the water, it comes out in wisps in the darkness, red-black shadows invisible in the darkness. He’s poked _through_ , prodded with dragon-fingers. Nothing here but hatred and hunger, it’s something stranger than any nightmare that’s disturbed his sleep. He lets the last bubble of stale air out and the water fills his lungs and he dies hearing nothing that sounds like singing.

It’s the music of screams.

*

 _Tower Hotel, Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

Two in the morning and all Sam can still see is that flash of silver, not the smooth idealized mermaid fishtail fin, but something worse, breaking surface. Then, simultaneously, the sight of Manny being dragged under joins with the flickering millisecond image of the fin, like double-vision. Nothing like one of his _visions_ , because it’s just a memory, a _before_ , something he cannot alter.

They’d been unable to do a damn thing. It had taken too long to track him down. Sure, they were able to locate where Manny lived and worked, but it hadn’t done anything to stop the creature from killing again. From killing him.

They’d wasted bullets shooting the thing in the water, a shape that almost had a metallic shine in the darkness, and gotten no verification that they even got a hit that racked up any kind of damage. Definitely solid though, substantial enough, there has to be a way to kill it. If silver bullets didn’t work, then there has to be something that’ll do real damage.

Of course, as Dean argued when they’d finally left the beach, there isn’t any real proof that the bullets won’t work. They might have damn good aim but a shot in the dark, into water, that’ll handicap even the best shot. And they were raised to be the best shots.

They’d even jumped in the water, following after the impossible trail, foolish, Sam now knows, if the creature, _mermaid_ , had still been there, they’d be very dead right now. And it’s the ocean, no better place to disappear, especially with the advantage of it being the creature’s natural home. Short of growing gills or completely losing their minds, the only way to figure this one out is to break apart the things that don’t make sense. The inkling that Sam’s had since the first interview with the young girl, it’s only gotten worse and increases when Dean mentions how one of the people at the barbershop had gotten all skittish when Manny had brought up the dreams of the mermaid days before.

Now they’re way too cold, the air conditioning still set to frostbite any and all extremities. Adrenaline’s the only thing keeping them awake at this point. Sam’s skin still feels wet, sand still clinging to his feet but he’s not able to hop into the shower. The sea salt scent keeps his head in the game and they’ve got a lot to cover. They need to find a clear way of killing the creature. Yeah, once they know what hell they’re doing, the rest of this will be a cakewalk.

When Sam closes his eyes, he can picture the look of the guy just as he was pulled under, like the spell suddenly snapped and the guy, Manny, _knew_ in that instant the exact shape of nightmare he’d succumbed to. Like he’d been willing just long enough for it to get him close enough but it _needed_ his fear before finally killing him. Something else to chew on, another problem that hopefully will have the right solution: the way to kill the creature before another person dies.

“Okay,” Dean says, chomping at the bit, rustling the notes he snatched out of Sam’s hands after he’d finished his beer, “so...the barber does the shave and a haircut two bits to Manny and that Rob guy and Henry Norwood. Marcos Flores’s mom knew about Henry hiding the fact that he had...what the hell did you scribble here?”

“Alzheimer’s. Early Onset,” Sam says, once again sitting in front of the laptop. His eyes are going to bleed out of his sockets if he has to look at yet another article about Yvette García and how tragic it was that her career was cut so short, like she’d been a local hero and not a quasi-journalist _actress_. “Which is rare but apparently there is an Alzheimer’s charity that has the Norwood name listed as one of their top benefactors, so it could have been in the family. Henry Norwood kept his diagnosis secret and Marcos killed him for whatever crazy reason?”

Dean picks up on Sam’s doubtful tone and admits, “Yeah, that is kind of soap opera. But then you factor in that Marcos is getting Henry’s fortune and yahtzee, there’s a motive. Money makes people stupid and crazy.”

“But he isn’t inheriting anything,” Sam says, surprised, looking at an article posted on one of the gossip pages that he’s unfortunately had to scour ever since Henry Norwood became a confirmed victim. “And it’s not like Marcos is hurting, money-wise, apparently his dad was some big land developer until his untimely death. There’s a mention of the Norwood ‘estate’ and the only things Marcos’s getting are the things he already owned, which included their mansion. All of Norwood ’s money is being donated to various charities and local businesses.”

“There any way of getting a list of those charities and businesses?”

Sam cuts himself off from the smartass comment he wants to deliver. Only because he looks up, catches Dean’s face, distant, weariness muddled in, adrenaline can take you only so far after all, but there’s patience in that expression. Dean’s waiting for Sam to catch up.

Like back in River Grove, that’s what Dean’s been thinking about, what he’s been holding back.

Bad memories coming to the surface, the way it had ended with a whimper, not even a definite defeat or a draw, just something that felt rotten and really damn suspicious. A demon virus that wiped out a whole town and there’s still no answers for why it started _or_ ended.

Instead of bringing it up, because if he puts the shape of the idea in words, then it _counts_ , that’s Dean’s modus operandi after all, Dean offers, “Who knows. Maybe it’s like that town that had the lottery?”

“I hope you’re talking about the book,” Sam says, needing confirmation that Dean and Dad haven’t come across a place that actually performs that horrible yearly ritual.

“What book?” Dean frowns and Sam tries to think if there was any reference to a town full of once-a-year murders using the lottery system in Dad’s journal. Then Dean says, “They made a book out of that movie?”

“Uh,” Sam manages, fighting off a yawn, deciding to go for the easiest route, “yeah.”

“That’s stupid,” Dean decides with clear finality on the subject. He rubs above his right eye, his eyebrow going slightly crooked, like a half-cocked V shape. “So these people are either really involved or they let the genie out of the bottle without knowing what the hell it was and it was in a mood to start racking up sacrifices. Me, I’m good with either theory. What we should be working on is how to kill this son of a bitch.”

Sam does agree with that, but he’s just noticed a news brief just posted on the _Miami Herald_ website. “Huh. Hey, this is interesting.”

“What?”

“They finally identified the bodies of those two female victims. Luz and Ana Álvarez. Their cousin, Marisol Paláez, had given a statement to a local paper about it. She’s pretty harsh about the media coverage, how they’ve been _glamorizing_ the other deaths.”

Dean sighs as he plops down on his bed, crossing his socked feet. “Who wouldn’t be pissed? You turn on the news and it’s that little girl, Straw Hair-”

“Elena,” Sam gently corrects, knows that Dean isn’t listening, that in his mind, that poor girl will always be remembered for her dark blondish hair, sun-bleached and flattened shoulder-length.

“Or it’s about the newlyweds or Norwood or the hot one, Yvette.” Dean’s hands briefly cup over his chest as though Sam hadn’t noticed from every damn picture of Yvette that she’d been, well, she’d been Dean’s type. But then, any kind of woman fell under _Dean’s type_. There’s a touch of acid to Dean’s voice as he says, “Nothing sexy about dead immigrants apparently.”

“Well,” Sam says, stretching out the vowel in a poorly disguised yawn, “it might start getting interesting now. The Paláez family?”

“Let me guess.” Dean waves a hand towards Sam, like he’s handing the air to Sam on a plate, “Pillars of the community.”

“More like, they used to own most of the stores around here until they started moving out to the exclusive gated communities. Marisol Paláez has some harsh words to say about her family, especially since some of them had known that Ana and Luz were attempting to illegally emigrate here, despite all the stories of coyotes taking advantage of the refugees.”

“Huh. You think we got an in?”

Sam smiles. “It’s late, but she’s got a MySpace account under her actual name and it’s active, she might still be online. I bet she wouldn’t mind dishing to a reporter looking to do a story focusing on the Álvarezes.”

“Dude. You stalker,” Dean says, a faint mix of pride and Sam bets that Dean still thinks that MySpace is a porn site. “See if you can get her to meet with you at the park in the morning. It’ll make it easier. I’ve gotta track that Rodrigo dude down. He was all kinds of shady and he got real antsy when Manny brought up that he’d been hearing the goddamn mermaid.”

It doesn’t need to be said, but Dean’s _Dean_ , so he says, “Fucking _mermaid_ , man.”

*

 _Máximo Gómez Park (Domino Park), Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

Dean’s come across his fair share of old grey-haired men brimming full of vinegar and hard spirits (whiskey men most of them, the ones that Dean’s known all his life), able to mow down a mouthy young upstart with just a few choice words. These men might have rum as their drink of choice and their coffee might taste a little different, but barring the language, Dean recognizes these people. He is _so_ in his element.

Yeah, Dean had been that young upstart once upon a time, but he’s learned how to tamp down on his natural instincts to piss off his elders. At least, he likes to pretend he does, even though he’s getting a few dirty looks tossed in his direction as he makes his way into the crush of the crowd, easily seeing over the heads of the shorter Cubans.

God, sometimes he loves it when he towers over people, the cures of being the older brother of a freakin’ Yeti means that Dean gets a skewed perspective on the average height of most folks. Here, all he has to do is _stand_ , not even have to stretch upwards all casual-like. Dean doesn’t _do_ the whole stretching up to see over the heads of people because as long as he’s breathing, there’s no way he’s letting Sam catch him stand on up fuckin’ tip-toes or any shit like that. The day Dean lets that happen, Sam’ll have ammunition to bring up anytime Dean tries to get Sam’s hackles raised with some good-hearted ribbing.

There’s a game on that’s got most people interested, down to two players really, though there are two other white-haired guys sitting there as well, so ancient that they look like they’re fused to the seats like barnacles. Yeah, it’s the two _younger_ (relatively speaking) guys that are drawing all the attention.

It’s the Comedian, Rodrigo, and Dean would say _long time, no see_ and interrupt this friendly little game of dominoes, but he needs to catch Rodrigo off-guard, best way to get some information loose. The other guy’s another oldster, hair thinning on top but not totally gone yet, a man with milky eyes (glaucoma? Whatever the dude has, it’s left his eyes really damn spooky).

Those creepy eyes move around too much while he’s taking his sweet time plotting his next move, and if a person didn’t know better (and oh, Dean so knows better), you could think that Creepy-Eyes is trying to get a signal on what to do next. Dude’s not even wasting time, he’s just messing with the Comedian.

People are making side bets on who’s gonna win, and it’s just freaking _dominoes_ , so what’s the point? There are better gambles to make. Dean wonders, distractedly, about the tendril of black ink peeking out of the frayed collar of Old Creepy. Something too slithery about how it curves and bends along his thick neck.

Then those dead eyes narrow, focused straight on Dean’s face. Too late to look away and Dean forces himself to keep his face steady despite instincts yelling at him that he should run (and now would be a real good idea to _start_ running). For just a split second, hell, maybe less than that, Dean swears he sees a flicker of green in Creepy’s sick eyes but it fades away quicker than it appears.

 _Oh shit_.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Creepy’s natural frown turning upside down, which causes a hell of a lot more wrinkles to take up occupancy on his face, means that Dean’s just fucked himself royal.

It’s noisy enough that Dean can call Sam, let him know that they gotta book it now, but no way he’s gonna give up that he’s working with someone else, so he backs off, hearing the disappointed hollers and jubilant cheers as the game finally finishes. No idea who the hell won, not like it fucking matters.

Right now, that sea-bitch is winning the fucking game.

Because all of a fucking sudden? He can _hear_ something, distant and _beckoning_ him and he’s got a pretty damn clear idea of where the hell he needs to go.

Into the damn water, only he’s seen the end of the song, so forgive Dean for not losing his damn mind. Yeah, as beautiful as it sounds, something that could make you friggin’ cry if you were a total girl about that kind of stuff, Dean likes his eyes where they are (not in the belly of a beast) and he’s not in the mood for drowning.

Tempting as it sounds, he’ll have to pass, only then the song, like, _increases_ in volume in his head, and oh, this is freakin’ _bad_.

Doubling back, Dean sees Sam conversing with a pretty damn cute woman, a couple of years older than Dean himself, and hell, that’s hot, the older woman, but he can’t congratulate his brother now that he’s pretty sure he’s next on the mermaid’s goddamn hit list. Instead he sets himself behind a tree (or plants himself, heh), making sure Sam won’t be able to see him and he dials Sam’s cell.

“Dean?”

“Dude,” Dean lets out a breath of fake disappointment, savoring the moment, “you don’t even let it ring more than once? Smile at the hot chick to reassure her you’re not a total eunuch. Is that Marisol?”

“A what? You heard that from _Pirates of the Caribbean_ , didn’t you?” Sam doesn’t even bother to address the fact that Dean must be able to see him, he’s keeping the tone light but he’s knows this game. “And yes, it is.”

Dean pauses too long and finally gives up the ghost, “Okay, guilty. But Jack Sparrow is awesome, even you gotta admit that. And uh, speaking of guilty, I think I might’ve found one of the guys that’s been dropping off some of the human sacrifices up close and personal. And uh, call that one a hunch.”

Because the singing only kicked in the second Old Creepy gave him the evil eye, which once again, _shit_.

“Where is he?” Clipped and too hungry, Sam’s looking for another Win. Something that’ll keep the score in their favor. Shit.

“He spotted me. Uh, I think, shit, Sam, I think the dude _knows_. About what we’re hunting.”

“And how do you _know_?” There’s something else Sam says, but it’s muffled on purpose, probably him trying to placate the woman, giving her the soulful eyes, the whole treatment. God, nobody can resist that stuff and Dean’s counting himself in the masses.

“Uh, it’s not easy to explain. But I think we need to steal a boat tonight.” Dean doesn’t say that he’s thinking that because the mermaid’s giving him the coordinates in her freaky way, images layered over in words, elegant, like nothing he’s ever heard before. Nothing like backwards speech on a track or getting so high that you swear you can see colors in sound, it’s better than that.

Maybe if he hadn’t cut his teeth on rock music, he’d be impressed by the quality of her telepathic voice, her _singing_ voice, but as it stands, he’s just trying to figure out how to screw the bitch at her own game.

“We need to get _what_?”

“A boat. Don’t worry, I’ll figure that part out. We need to meet up someplace out of here. Can you hoof it to that pub place we passed by this morning?” Dean doesn’t wait for an answer, knowing that it’s a solid yes.

He ignores his curiosity for the time being, there’s no way in hell that he’s checking to make sure Old Creepy’s still occupied with dominoes. If Dean’s lucky, then maybe Creepy is sitting down for another round.

Dean’s never that lucky. But he’s got his car and a short drive to work out a shred of the nice big ball of anxiety coiling in his stomach, which isn’t gonna ease. Not when he’s being offered a monstrous goddess of the water singing just for him.

*

 _El Pub, Calle Ocho, Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

“So, spill the beans about Marisol or I’ll take your beans,” Dean says, raising his fork over Sam’s huge plate. Piled high with beans, rice, and chicken, it’s comfort food and exactly what Sam needs right now.

He’s suffering from information overload. Marisol, who’d accepted his lies with a dismissive wave of her curly hair, dark brown locks tossing from shoulder to shoulder as she contemplated him, had told him more than he could’ve expected. She’d claimed her reason was because _he’s the only person who isn’t family who’s attempted to give a damn about her cousins_.

She’d been lying there but had been honest about the rest of it that Sam didn’t press her any further than she’d been willing to bend.

But he’s going to have to let the information trickle out. Messing with people who mess with dark spirits only ends a lot of trouble even when you’re prepared. And Dean, evasive as he’s acting, what with his fork dangling over Sam’s plate (exaggerations of his natural _Deanness_ have become hollow ever since Dad died), oh, Dean’s _hiding_ something real damn bad.

“Hey, you were the one who said, for the first time in your life, I think, that you’re not hungry.” Sam smacks Dean’s fork away, dragging his already used fork all over his food, knowing it’s a useless deterrent. Dean and his disgusting food habits.

Sam offers up the few interesting nuggets he’d gleaned from Marisol, the most interesting one that Marisol used to work at _Flores Y Maya_ before she quit in disgust after one too many arguments with Mrs. Flores. Arguments that she hadn’t fully explained beyond the fact that she didn’t like that the store was so willing to sell off precious charms and materials that could lead to some pretty nasty spells for anyone who asked for it, amateurs and Santerian priests alike.

“This whole thing making your head hurt?” Dean’s still giving Sam’s food the hardest stare ever, like he’s working on a Jedi Mind Trick (and Dean _has_ tried to make that work, when they were young and yeah, Sam still needs to tease Dean about that some more). The food isn’t going to march to his side of the table as Sam’s wisely curled his arm around the plate.

“A little bit.” Dean’s still eyeing Sam’s plate, only the look’s harder, like Dean’s forcing himself to focus on it, so Sam, feeling extremely generous, asks for a second plate from the waitress and divides up the food.

Dean’s _thank you_ is masked when he shovels into a forkful of food that’s two sizes too big for his mouth. Masticating loudly, Dean says, “So you know what ya gotta do.”

At least, that’s what Sam can translate from Dean’s foreign language of _People Who Did Not Learn Not to Speak with a Full Mouth_.

Sam watches each enormous bite of the black beans with trepidation, thinking of the damage that Dean can do later.

Maybe getting banished to a night of hustling a security guard will be okay ‘cause Sam can’t take a night of gassy delights care of his brother. Not to mention having to listen to all the clever jokes Dean has about his bodily functions. No, he’ll just order another café con leche and let himself operate on caffeine for the rest of the night, mercifully away from the revenge of the beans when they finally go through Dean’s body.

“If this creature’s being summoned then we can banish her pretty easy. It turns out that summoning spells specific to Santeria aren’t that complex and I can pick up the supplies while you go scope out the boat.”

“That ain’t a problem in Miami,” Dean says, probably ticking off one small point in the Miami ‘pros’ column of his running tab on the worthiness of Florida. Spearing a couple of wily beans with the bent outer twine of his fork, Dean adds, “It’s like, this is prime motorboat country. I’m gonna pick out the docks and you get ready to embroider a name on the Rent-A-Cop uniform.”

*

 _Orange Grove Docks, Miami, Florida_

Jacking a car in Miami’s probably a little easier than this but Dean ain’t gonna tell Sam that. No, it’ll be a piece of freakin’ cake and thank god the stupid little marina office has a cute little pixie working the desk or he’d never learn that tonight’s his lucky night. Hell, any night’s his lucky night, ‘cause they have just the one guard who “personally” looks after the docks and makes sure there’s no mischief. Like, say a couple of guys were planning on lifting a boat for a couple hours or so while they send a mermaid back to Davy Jones’s locker or wherever the fuck the damn mermaid came from, not like Dean really cares.

Hell, maybe they become _sea foam_ for all that freaking matters.

Dude, so long as it leads to _silence_ in his head, beyond the random thoughts like _I’m hungry_ , _I wonder when they’ll finally release that Bruce Campbell movie_ , and _damn, that’s **sweet**_. You know, thoughts that belong to him not a goddamn mythical creature that should stay in the freakin’ stories because the eye-popping and killing just ain’t charming.

But for now, he’s got one thing that’s making him smile, big and wide. It’s not the pixie, Angie, who’s giving him an earnest tour that should be boring but isn’t, what with her crooked smile that sneaks out every time she finishes a sentence. Though, she is cute, she’s dangling a little too close to the jailbait line, and man, having a monster singing in your head really fucks with the libido. So, it isn’t Angie that’s making Dean feel like a million or so bucks for a split second, nah, instead it’s the gorgeous sleek black beauty bobbing gently in the marina’s waters.

The luck’s in the draw and Dean’s scored big, Fountain Mercury 35 Lightning, big ticket boat kept in primo condition, done up by someone who was having a love affair with black and hell, Dean is not gonna complain on that front. He’s kind of in love and it feels a bit like cheating, like once he steps off the dock and onto dry land, he’ll have to apologize to his Impala.

Some folks want a car or a boat that’s just a pussy wagon and yeah, it _is_ kind of a motorboat for total pussies, all flash and shit, but he checks out the details, inspecting all the high-tech shit that’s been added on. He also gets some info from a beleaguered owner of a modest houseboat, an oldster who takes great pains to let Dean know how damn fast the owner drives this thing, _looking to hit 86 knots if he can get away with it_.

Angie swears to Dean that really, the owner’s only here twice a year at most and never comes down in January or February, believing that there are just too many tourists.

 _Well_ , Dean thinks, _that might just work_. He makes his excuses, his goodbyes, accepts Angie’s phone number, raising an eyebrow in surprise. Really, if she’s eighteen then he’d be freaking amazed.

Heading back to the car, taking it slow because oh, baby, he did stray, but the boat’s aching to be admired. Pulling out his cell phone and dialing Sam, he clears his throat, waiting for Sam to pick up. Hearing his brother’s slight breath, Dean says, not letting Sam get in a _hello_ or anything, “We got to get a bigger boat.”

“You found one that works?”

“Dude.” Dean pets the roof of his car and _ow_ , he forget about the damn sun, shit, she’s _burning_ like she’s fire-engine red. “I found the Corvette of motorboats.”

Sam repeats, “So did you find one that works?”

“Shut up.”

Sad thing is, he’s not even saying that to Sam. He’s going to be fuckin’ _jubilant_ once they kill this mermaid creature but good.

 _Follow me, so close to all you ever wanted, silence, safe, here, follow me_.

“Oh, and change of plans by the way. I think you need to chain me up.”

There’s a cough and Sam’s sputtering over the phone.

“ _Freak_. Not like that. But one of us has to hear her and I think it’s her voice that’s toxic, from what information we’ve got working for us about the guys. If I’m restrained but I can hear her, then I won’t do anything stupid.”

“Other than the bait thing. Which is stupid.”

“Yeah. Now you’re getting it, Sammy.” Dean knows it sounds fake, but he has to be push it, saying, “I know what I’m doing.”

“Dean.” A pause, Sam trying to collect himself, before he lets out in a reluctant breath, “Offered sacrifices seems to be her favorite thing. But, this is a bad idea.”

“You figure out something better, we’ll go for that. Otherwise, start stocking up on the chains and ropes and let your inner freak go wild.” Dean shuts off the phone before Sam gets a chance to retort.

*

 _Orange Grove Docks, Miami, Florida_

Sam wonders what exactly was going through his mind when he volunteered to distract the lone security guard at the docks. The way he’s playing, he’ll be out of their emergency cash in another two rounds.

“You try to beat me with a dead man’s hand?” says the grizzled guard in his grizzled grey voice. He has _Raúl_ listed as his first name on his badge, but he refuses to answer to that name, insisting that Sam call him Chago, based off his surname.

Sam really doesn’t want to call a grown name Chago and it doesn’t matter what he calls him because Sam is getting _cleaned out_.

Chago lays down his hand with a flourish, running a leathery brown hand through his patchy near-shaved hair. He’s a man made for a long full beard but that isn’t meant to be in humid Miami weather, even in the middle of winter. Not to mention a winter like this, so damn hot it’s still a touch too warm in near-midnight hours.

“You’re a hard one to beat,” Sam admits, no need to feign that he’s impressed by the guard, especially since every trick Sam knows to use in the Dean-patented book of cheats has pretty much been evaded. Sam sweeps the deck up in his hand, easily cutting the deck. He is a Winchester after all, even though he’s never been able to master these games the way Dean has.

“It’s good that they hired someone, it’s been long enough.” Chago had claimed that he’d only liked Texas Hold ‘Em on T.V., claiming to prefer Five Card Stud, but he’d acquiesced to a game of the Texas rules. Now he’s kind of _schooling_ Sam in this game and once again, Sam? Is the brother of Dean Winchester, so to get his ass so thoroughly handed to him, well, it’s a good thing that Dean isn’t here, moaning at all the cash Sam’s throwing away. “Better, I’ll get money to pay for a down payment on my root canal thanks to you.”

Through this, they have been making silent gestures – Sam’s gotten screwed on the turn and Chago makes no sign of whether the river has done anything to his two cards, but there is straight flush potential.

Chago points at somewhere on the left side of his face, probably a bottom tooth, he mercifully doesn’t open his mouth. “No dental, no medical, you better start looking for a better job. You’re a young kid, don’t you want to do something better?”

Sam nods, trying not to move too much as he can feel his uniform bursting at the seams. Dean must’ve had the last turn at doing laundry, he always overdoes the drying.

They turn over their cards and Sam’s done for the game but Chago’s failed to realize, thanks to the radio that’s been blaring slow Cuban ballads ( _those are boleros, kid, the music that came with us when we moved to this country, real music_ , Chago told him when Sam had ‘reported for duty’ as it were), that he’s out one boat, care of Dean.

Sam may feel like crap later, but hey, if the boat survives, he did get Dean to swear that they’d return the boat. It’s really just a more complicated version of hot-wiring a car, as Dean had insisted.

*

 _Atlantic Ocean, miles away from Miami, Florida_

Sam’s crash course in driving a boat, in darkness no less, is exactly what he should’ve expected. Dean makes a poor joke about how he’ll lose more than his shot at a boating license if he fails the driving test later.

The boat’s so _Dean_ that he almost refused to get on, almost expecting it to be blaring Metallica the moment he stepped on it. There’s no music, nothing save the sounds of the ocean, the roar of the motor, Dean’s way-too enthusiastic admirations of the original owner of this boat. Boy, whoever owns this boat (and saw fit to actually freaking name it _The Long Glider_ ), is going to be pissed by what they’ve already done with it, symbols marked around the cockpit area. Sam had to make the easy lewd joke before Dean even got a second to say anything about _that_.

They’d only studied maps of the waterways for an hour but Dean easily navigates where he needs to go and they’re out in the Atlantic soon enough. Dean revs the engine – or whatever the appropriate term is for testing the alleged 97 mph top speed of the boat – and Sam gets real busy with not falling off and you know, _dying_.

It’s a tense ride, this, and Sam’s best way to deal is to work out the incantations he’ll need to say later. The summoning can turn to banishment with just a few judicious noises interspersed in the spells.

“You gotta take over now, man,” Dean tells Sam as he kills the motor. “We’re almost in the Yemaya’s territory.”

“If it is Yemaya.” Sam’s done a little more research on that particular spirit and as she’s represented in the Santeria faith, she’s almost peaceful. But she’s the only supernatural being that’s represented as a mermaid in most of her iconography that would be distinctly recognizable to Cubans.

“Yeah, it could be just your run of the mill pissed-off magical mermaid. If her name’s Ariel and she’s a redhead, I say go for it.”

“Don’t make me _enjoy_ gagging you,” Sam mutters, opening up the duffel stuffed full of rope, handcuffs, and a makeshift gag that Dean had insisted be thoroughly cleaned beforehand. “I can’t believe you made me clean your gag.”

“You know what? When you’re bait, you get to make the rules. My safe word’s Kelly Clarkson.”

Sam has to process that for a moment longer that he should, saying, “Dude, you watched _The Forty Year Old Virgin_? When? And _why_?”

“Hey, Steve Carell is hilarious,” Dean says defensively. “And man, thank god I don’t need to wax. That was messed up.”

It’s not easy work doing this, first checking the initial ropes already tied to the boat and adding _more_ along the railing around the edge of the boat’s bow, but the boat they’ve got is relatively stable.

Asking _but why you_ is useless when Dean’s sure of something, sure that the only way that they’re going to find this mermaid is by playing a game of bait. Dean lumbers, slowly, into place, Sam makes quick work of lashing him to the boat, tight enough that it’s only slightly uncomfortable. Getting back into the cockpit, it’s time to start with his own necessary restraints.

So Sam’s got the earplanes stuck in his ears and the newly purchased headphones (guaranteed to block out any sound) stuck firmly on his head _and_ he has Dean’s tapes blaring in a battered tape deck found in the cabin. Sam checks the ropes around Dean one more time, pulling at them to check that the only slack there is for breathing purposes.

He’s still kneeling over Dean when he feels an earplane dislodge. Sam pulls the headphones askew, removing the stupid thing, asking Dean, “Are you ready, Odysseus?”

Sam can’t help the snotty tone, this is easily sliding in their top ten list of idiotic plans, the best thing he can do right now is ignore the seasickness sloshing around in his stomach by reminding Dean how _stupid_ they’re being.

“Screw that, dude. I’m Hercules. Only you know, not Greek and into rolling around naked with other guys. Now put your damn headphones back on.”

Sam tightens the rope around Dean’s chest when he realizes there’s too much give, nearly straining a muscle in the effort to keep himself from rolling his eyes upwards towards the starry black sky. “No, you’re into pissing off water spirits. Because drowning is an _awesome_ way to go.”

There’s a flex in Dean’s jaw, something being kept back for the sake of Sam and that pisses Sam off more than it should, leading him to almost yank the rope around Dean’s neck hard enough to choke him. He stops though, warning Dean, “You’ll black out if you move your head too much. It’s the failsafe if this is an honest-to-god mermaid and it can’t be banished.”

No point in dropping the anchor out here. The motorboat’s equipped with state-of-the-art gadgets, enough that Sam can make sure he stays close enough to the coast. Not like it’ll help any. They’re playing _bait_ in open water. Only thing they can do now is wait. Yeah, this plan is skyrocketing to the top of the “Most Idiotic Plans” list.

It takes longer than either of them expects and Sam kind of hopes the Dean has to pee real bad just so he can put things into better perspective and maybe they’ll cut this short and figure out another way to start up the banishing incantation, to work around its spatial limitations. But then, Dean starts rocking around, pointing towards something in the water and _fuck_.

It’s not the glimmer of the mermaid, it’s another boat. It’s hard to make out who it is, but the person’s got a bullhorn and San wishes he could hear what’s going on because whatever it is, it’s making Dean nervous as all hell.

They have to get out of here. It’s obvious.

But before Sam can turn the motors back on, all the electrical equipment dies and the other boat, going too fast just _lurches_ awfully, there’s a shape tumbling off the boat but it’s too hard to see and there just isn’t the time to _wonder_ because it’s time to step it up.

Sam starts working, fast, double time on the incantation, it doesn’t matter that he can’t hear it, as long as _she_ can hear it that’s all that matters.

He hears something, but he shouldn’t, something cutting through the muffled silence, cutting quick, this ghastly bubble of watery noise, almost like a woman’s voice, but distorted, saying, _I’m calling for you, Dean_.

She doesn’t hit the boat, not really, but Sam’s knocked down despite this, but he’s on his knees, able to watch as the tentacles strike and wrap around Dean, horrible, the silvered-gold scales turning green in the moonlight. Flick and burst, rope torn apart like it was make of paper, split open with deft scissors, tentacles close enough that Sam notices the subtle spikes flexing open becoming deadlier.

Then the rest of her, the half that is more monster, the _tail_ bursts out of the water with a spray, soft mist. It tapers down to a fine point, snake-tail, monster-tail, wrapping quick and true, tighter, _tighter_ , like it’s all freaking slow-motion and this is the part where Jaws gets a good chomp of the boat.

Sam barely gets out _no_ before Dean’s pulled into the water, all his ropes uselessly torn off his body like they were nothing, child’s play.

Rage, burning in Sam’s mind, expansive and _horrible_ , hissing violence but it doesn’t matter, because Dean will _not_ be dragged under. Sam kicks at the winch, knocking it back on and there, the pull of it, Dean might be getting a good idea of what a worm on a hook feels like.

Sam knocks off his stupid headphones, tears off the plugs in his ears, because he realizes now, she’s been calling for Dean in his mind, the only reason he knew this was the place to stop, not just a guess based off of their research. Godammit, Dean, but there’s nothing he can do, can barely slip-slide out of the cockpit towards his brother before he _sees_ it, the sharp image of Dean going under, the contrast of silvered-green scales tight on Dean’s body.

There’s a scream over the water, a scream that echoes farther than possible and Sam sees a flash of red, _blood_ and there, the other person who had fallen, he’s gotten closer and he’s screaming at Sam, but the other scream, her scream, is drowning him out.

Dean’s been pulled back towards the boat, to Sam and Sam doesn’t wait the time to think whether it’s possible, he just yanks Dean back up, relieved that Dean’s eyes open after he’s surfaced, eyes still intact and while he’s bleeding, he doesn’t look like she had a shot at crushing him to death.

A brief moment, but in situations like this, it’s those moments that can stretch out the longest if you’re lucky, she must be readying for another kind of attack because the motors kick on all of a sudden and Sam doesn’t need another second to decide, bringing the boat to its highest speed, getting the fuck out there.

With the anchor line, heavy old chain, still wrapped around Dean, leaving him stuck with the only option to lie down on the deck floor. Breathing, hard, still alive and utterly conscious.

He doesn’t say a damn thing as they hightail it back to land.

*

 _Tower Hotel, Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

Dean’s still shivering even after the hot shower, occasionally running the last clean towel over his head like it’ll get the shakes out of him. “Mermaid, my ass,” he says, the first thing he’s said since they made it back to their hotel room, Dean needing to use Sam as support. Sam doesn’t want to think about how bruised Dean’ll be tomorrow morning.

“It’s not just a water spirit. Yemaya. The banishing didn’t do a damn thing.” Ticking off their list of things it can’t be, ignoring his need to start yelling at Dean for nearly letting himself get killed. “Sirens usually call people to them but these attacks have escalated to the shore. And it couldn’t destroy a motorboat, so it’s not fast enough to follow. Means that it has to lay low. There’ve been no attacks during the day. But we can’t tell _if_ the weapons we used before worked because I couldn’t get a clear shot back when we tried to save Manny.”

Sam pauses, not wanting to say the next thing. Runs his tongue along the back of his front teeth and it’s not surprising that he still tastes seawater. “You have any more urges to _follow her_?”

More words hanging between them, now from an actual sea monster. Calling for Dean.

“Fuck no,” Dean mutters, building a barrier between them, precise folds of the towel until it’s folded so compact that Sam would assume that it would just open up all over again, only because it’s Dean and he knows how to fold when he puts his mind to it. Sam remembers a bitter comment, he had been all of thirteen and tired of being still thought of as “that guy Dean’s younger brother,” saying to his brother while Dean folded their laundry, _don’t know why you bother doing that, you always mix up the navy and blacks, Mom_.

Such a petty stupid comment and that’s what’s on Sam’s mind.

“Okay. So maybe it takes time. Manny’s coworkers said he’d started staring off at the ocean a week before the attack.” A week before they were too late and watched someone die, helpless to stop him from being dragged into the water’s depths. “Those that believe the legends keep on talking about Yemaya, but that isn’t working-”

“That guy that showed up. I think I know who he is. Was, considering how pissed she was, you heard that screaming huh?” Dean doesn’t let Sam answer, continuing, “he’s had mermaids on the brain for years. Rodrigo. He’d freaked out when Manny mentioned mermaids. Thought he was shady but you know, it would just be our freakin’ luck if he’d been on the up and up.”

Dean throws the towel in a general direction towards the bathroom door, a small flick of a smile at the muffled thump against the cheap wood door.

“How’d he know that we’d be there?”

Dean looks at Sam sideways.

“What?”

“There was this other guy at the park. Looked at me funny. Only way he can look, his vision was all messed up. He’d been playing dominoes with Rodrigo.”

“You think it’s a lead?”

“Uh,” Dean rubs the back of his neck, he’s going to be sore all over later and Sam doesn’t tell him that maybe he shouldn’t bother to do that because it won’t help at all. “I think it damn well is.”

*

 _Tower Hotel, Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

Dean wakes up painfully hard, his cock not aching for a vision, but for a voice. But the worst of it all the fucking bruises make it a pain to breathe, let alone get himself to the bathroom to whack off, but he’s nothing if not determined. And okay, he might have been a little more noisy that he usually is, so it’s not a surprise when he shuffles (or stumbles, something shambling and fit for a decrepit old man or bruised-within-an-inch-of-his-life guy), that’s Sam’s back at his damn laptop, pointedly _not_ looking at Dean.

“Voices have power,” Sam says, scanning a website. “You know Cleopatra wasn’t known for being beautiful, the records say it was her voice that was her most attractive feature.”

Leaning against a wall, Dean asks, “Why do I need to know that?”

“Because I think I found what’s been killing all these people.”

“Not Yemaya?”

“No.” Sam puts on the kind of smile he’d have when he was still in elementary school, bringing home a perfect report cared. “ _Aycayia_.”

“Okay,” Dean hobbles over his bed, forcing himself to lie down, saying, “Please tell me there’s a way to kill her.”

“That’s kind of the problem. All the legends just talk about _how_ she transformed into a mermaid, not anything about what could kill her. The legends about Aycayia imply she’s something of a...sexual character and judging by, uh, your reaction, that part of it might be true.”

“Man,” Dean groans, “why hell do people do such freakass things for kinky sex? Plus, I don’t even want to think about how’d you go about fucking a mermaid.”

“She’d probably transform back into human form once she got her final sacrifice.”

“There a countdown to how many she needs to kill? Because, uh, she isn’t blasting as hardcore in my head. She’s kind of whispering.”

“Yeah, and it’s a good thing you didn’t tell me about that, Dean,” Sam snaps, his hands curling into fists. It takes a lot of effort in his part to flex them open, breathing out his frustration. “I...don’t know what the hell you were thinking.”

“I wasn’t able to think much ‘cept what she was freakin’ singing in my head, Sammy,” Dean bites out. “I wasn’t thinking all that clear, I just wanted to end it.”

It’s clear that Sam’s still pissed, but he shuts down that part of him that’s probably aching for a hell of a shoutfest, instead he says, “I called Marisol again while you were sleeping and she told me a story she’d always heard about Aycayia, back when she was a kid. Aycayia was banished to the waters because even when she’d been condemned to a near deserted island, she could still lure men. The legend goes that one day, she’d be able to break free thanks to sacrifices. Seven unwilling and seven willing. Turns out you’re too much of a stubborn bastard.”

Dean breathes out his surprise, wincing ‘cause it hurts all over, Jesus, he’ll need to get some painkillers in him or he’s gonna be useless. “Well, that’s just the Winchester genes. Told you I won the genetic lottery.”

“Yeah, you look like a real winner.” Sam then says, “Rest up. We have to find this other guy you mentioned.”  



	4. Viva Yemaya

_Máximo Gómez Park, Little Havana, Miami, Florida_

The man is the same empty eyed man, waiting at the domino table under the canopy. He has all the dominos splayed out but he is not looking at them. He looks up in the direction of Sam and Dean, his teeth momentarily flashing in neither a grimace nor a smile.

Dean wouldn’t mind slugging him but the painkillers he downed have made his coordination a little wonkier than he’d like and he really doesn’t want this bastard to get off with a damn love tap or something.

“She took Rodrigo.”

“That about sums it up,” Dean snarls.

Sam says, after flicking a quick look of worry at Dean, “And you’ve been helping her pick out victims?”

“I can take you to her. It has been too much death.” His anguish almost sounds genuine but Dean ain’t about to fall for it. “So much blood.”

“Well, we were looking to beat your ass for wrangling with a fucking psychopathic mermaid, but now you had a change of heart, huh?” Dean sits down across from Old Creepy Eyes, asking him point-blank, “How do we kill her?”

The eyes focus sharply on Dean and Dean suddenly is uncomfortably aware that his eyes were once like Dean’s, green in color. “You cannot kill her. Not anymore.”

“What do you mean by that?” Sam with the assist, sitting in one of the seats between Dean and Creepy Eyes, hunching over, but this time it’s a sign of strength. Sometimes it helps to have Gigantor as your little brother.

He lets out something between a bark and a sigh. “All these deaths. You have been hunting her and you don’t know what she is.”

“Aycayia,” Sam says, his tone furious. “A voice like a Siren out of the old legends, condemned to the ocean, and apparently murdering all the victims you and other people have been picking off for _years_.”

“We don’t pick them! She does.” His laugh is a terrible thing. “Sometimes it is no one, but she requires sacrifices. Our own kind. And there is no way to kill her, not now.”

Sam’s got steel glinting in his eyes when he counters with, “Not even by summoning Yemaya to do the dirty work?”

A faint trickle of astonishment crosses Old Creepy’s weathered face. “You know of Yemaya?”

“We know a lot of things,” Dean supplies tersely. “We don’t know your name.”

“Tavi.” He turns his hands over, inspecting both palms for a moment, then asking, “If you know how to kill her, then why have you hesitated?”

“Maybe ‘cause she’s gunning for me now? I tell you, the only thoughts I like knocking around my skull are my own. So she might be picking off people, but I’m thinking that you’re her eyes. Literally.”

A hand passes over Tavi’s eyes. Weary. “I do not pick them.”

“But you sure as well pull the damn trigger,” Dean says. Sam puts a hand on Dean, cautioning him. Dean hadn’t realized he’d been gripping the edge of the table, like he’s trying to snap it off in his hands.

“I can help you. Please, let me. A lifetime of sins can be redeemed, no?”

Dean wants to say _no_ but he isn’t in a mood for the redemption existential fucking arguments that Sam’ll toss around. What he wants is the fucking mermaid out of his head, he can’t take another moment of her singing, sweet promises that contradict the sight of the grisly murders she’s committed right in front of Dean. She might have turned it down to only a whisper, but it’s almost worse that way, forcing him to listen _harder_ to make out the words.

“Okay,” Sam says, not letting Dean give his two cents to Tavi about how fucked up all this shit is. “But if we’re going to do this, then we’re doing it _our_ way. Not yours.”

*

 _South Beach, Miami, Florida_

Those boy-men, the ones who seek to end this all, will be here soon and the preparations are far from completed.

Tavi lets the candle burn until half his hand is coated in wax. Too much pain has already ravaged his body for this to be unbearable. His hands are the coarse hands of a sailor born in the wrong century, heavily callused and leathered, the price of too many hours spent under the unrelenting sun. These final mutilations are only penance for his revelation of the great secrets.

The knife, handle carved of bone and the blade oxidized bronze, honoring metamorphosis, the change of elements from beautiful to eerily strange, the curse of the ocean, is brought to his exposed wrist, where the wax has yet to run. It is a dull knife and he must flay his tough skin in a sawing motion, watching the hardened veins underneath finally open. Blood drips in the water.

She does not accept his humble offering.

Tavi’s knee is artificial now– he’d nearly lost his leg back in Vietnam but by _her_ graces, his leg had healed to leave him only with a severe limp – yet that doesn’t stop him from sinking to his knees in a fluid movement. The water hits him so hard in his legs that he has to shove his hands into the water, into the sand, holding on for all that he can, letting the suction keep him rooted like tenuous seaweed at the bottom of the ocean. The pressure in his legs builds but he ignores it. The salt burns his flowing wound and this, he realizes, is what she wanted.

He must give it to her willingly.

It is by her graces whether he lives or dies – he has served her since before Vietnam, before the Revolution, since forever. When he was young, the bastard son of a businessman, raised by a girl barely out of her teen years, he’d looked out to the waters, listening, listening so patiently, for a miracle that he knew must be out there.

One day, so many years ago, he heard it, coming from so far away and it had only gotten closer, when his family, then just his grandparents and he (his mother being dead for all he knew, a prostitute most likely), had escaped to Miami before they lost everything. They lost everything despite this, their gods did not listen to their prayers and penniless, Tavi sought to find the song lost in the ocean, until finally, she crept into his mind, nestling there to tell him all that she could offer him. He has survived on a false identity that has never been broken in over forty-five years, in as long as his Lady has been satisfied by the offerings. She has been the one entrusted to guard his secrets.

All she has ever asked of him is that he abides with her simple need – sustenance. _Food and worship_ , the words that sound equally hungry when she whispers them in his mind, in her beautiful voice offset by the watery echoes of the ocean’s depths. It is not much to ask. Just a few simple murders every now and again to let her survive bit a little longer, to wait until the time when the world forgot her, no longer fearing the sweet promise of surrender, offered by the honeyed whispers of her exquisite voice.

But her demands have changed and he has betrayed her, fool that he is, to deceive her chosen final sacrifice, the one that she whispers tastes of pain and unfilled promises. He will not die by the hands of humans in their righteous causes and for this, she is furious, her angry radiating in sound waves.

He has felt _guilt_ over the sacrifices, has almost mourned them as though they were worthy of being missed.

He will redeem himself, he is bringing her the final sacrifice, the one she has seen through his ruined eyes.

Her power has grown stronger, in a moment, a second of clarity, where the waves do not hit him as high, there is sudden silence of the waters, nothing save the distinct sound of two pairs of feet, still clad in boots, an awkward haphazard sound of sand kicked up as they approach him.

This is his part to play. “She is coming! You must be prepared. I cannot hold her—”

His Lady rises out of the water, her arms so close to as they once were, the color of sunburnt copper, barely tinged with green, she brings her hands towards him, asking for an embrace but he unable to move. She means to shame him, to tell him that this is all he ever was, but through this, he has survived. He does not know whether it is his thought or hers that he is grateful for his servitude. He thinks it is his. She has so many other worthy subjects, anxious for her release, that he is nothing to her.

But she is everything. Naked as the day she escaped, body still twisted, unable to decide between human or fish.

 _Your eyes are useless to me_ , she says, her voice only at a tremor of its full power, _I’ve used them all up, but your death, yes, that I need. I can always eat the other one after I tear out his eyes._

The wave carries her to Tavi, her lower body, still unchanged, more serpent than fish, that long tail, the spikes now metal-sharp, ripping into him as she squeezes. Laughing, she says, _I release you_ , but she does not mean a release from life or from this torture, it is a release from the cloud, the poison she has feed him since the first time he obeyed her call, the submission of his will, _you die belonging to me, but you may have this, the knowledge that all this was a lie._

She drags him under, to her prison, these many centuries, a watery grave that she defied. Her claws are still sharp, perhaps she will keep them always so sharp, it is easy to forget the claws when she sings so sweetly in his mind, but it is perverted now, her sweet, sweet lullaby of all that he has done in the name of her. The murders of innocents that he has bearing down on his immortal soul, the blood he has spilt when she called for it.

Urging him, she says, _scream for me_ and though no sound issues from his mouth, he screams just for her, obedient at his last moment of consciousness.

*

 _South Beach, Miami, Florida_

Now, onto her final sacrifice, green eyes that she will take for her own, the rage and hatred that she needs for final sustenance, the one that calls himself _Dean_.

She is beautiful and knows this, knows it in words that could drive men and women alike into madness if she didn’t offer her words in a voice so sweet no man could resist. But they had found a way to silence her, not long enough to kill her, no, she could not be killed by a mere _man_. They took away what makes her human, transformed the woman-body that they could not resist, created the monster they were so sure was always there waiting inside, the Bitch Queen, Aycayia.

So she has waited. And there were selfish people, still are selfish, waiting for her. They have listened to stories about her and only heard that she had _power_ and because she knows this, she has offered them the world and they have taken it, at the price of a few deaths, a snack every so year.

And when she told them that all it took was fourteen souls of her choosing for unlimited gifts, they gave to her gladly.

Now it is time for her last taste, insolent boy, thinking he could dare find a way to kill her. No man shall ever find a way and now, now she shall bring him to his knees, begging for death.

She shall give it gladly. It is time to rise back to the surface, this time, forever, and claim her sweet victory.

*

 _South Beach, Miami, Florida_

His brain is saying _c’mon, it’s okay_ and he wants to, God, he does, but there’s a flash of silver in the dark waters and the only thing he’s got left is this little pang (call it reason, but Dean’s never been one to survive on reason alone), kinking up his stomach something awful. Nothing like a muscle memory. Sure as hell ain’t hope. But it’s enough.

“Sorry, I don’t do MILF’s. Monsters I’d Like to F-“ he adds, attempting to smile as the face rises from the water’s surface.

Barely time to register that mix of human and fish and _what the fuck is that?_ , when there’s a sharp hit and he goes down with a grunt when the mermaid, _Aycayia_ , knocks him into the water with one sound blow. Those hands of her are more claws than anything else, still not gonna pass for human, which is why she’s angling to tear out his eyes, and fuck, those claws pack a hell of a punch.

“Fuck,” he wheezes after a minute, trying to catch up since he nearly just got the wind knocked out of him. That shit hurts.

She says something in her beautiful voice, not in English or in Spanish, but in her native tongue, her taloned fingers reaching out towards Dean. Grasping, and it’s like he can’t freaking _move_ , the way she leaves ripples through the water and his name on her lips, words he doesn’t understand and doesn’t _want_ to understand before and after, a command, a prayer, whatever, this can’t be good.

Dean never thought of his bones have much give, sure, his muscles and ligaments, they have all the give until they don’t, but bones? Nah man, he never even thought he’d have to test that, but winding up as bait for some sea bitch? It’ll give ya a new perspective on things.

But you have to hand it to Sammy. You tell a goddess that one of her charges is trying to break from her prison and she takes that seriously. Summoning Yemaya is like calling the ocean.

And the ocean is a bigger bitch than Aycayia. No contest.

Sure, it hurts like hell and he has some nasty cuts over bruise and goddamn, he’ll need a pharmacy’s worth of meds to knock him out of this pain, or some serious booze, but this time, Dean got the playing bait thing down stone cold.

There’s no spirit conjured up that looks like all the images of Yemaya, no it’s just water and fury and a crack that sounds like thunder but there’s no lightning bolt striking across the sky.

Now you see the crazy fucking mermaid shrieking in surprise and for once she ain’t digging her claws in flesh but feebly in the sand, at foam, like it’ll hold her back and prevent this, the strong tow of the ocean. And now, all there is left is the sound of the ocean, of the water, washing the monster back to the briny deep.

“Any way to promise that she’s gone for good?” Dean asks as he collapses next to Sam, finds himself shaking the sand and grime off his hands, almost resting an arm on his knee but decides the better of it. Sea monsters are hard on the hand-eye coordination and he’s perfectly fine with lying down for the next month.

Sam blows out the candle, a votive for Yemaya, and leans back into the damp sand. “She’s a protector spirit. Once she’s called for her duty, she’ll never stop.”

“Kill a mermaid by asking the ocean to lock her back up. Nice,” Dean acknowledges, nods at the shoreline. It’s peacefully calm, the furrows from nails wiped clean from the lapping ocean.

They sit there for a good few minutes, and Sam’s the one who says, “Freaking mermaids.”

Dean grunts, like _about time_ , and flops onto his back with, “Wake me up in a week.”

*

 _I-95, twenty miles to Georgia_

Leaving isn’t the problem. Packing up their stuff at the Tower Hotel had taken less than twenty minutes.

Dealing with what they saw, with what they uncovered, that’s the problem.

Dean’s shoulders are so tense that Sam just knows he’s trying to reconcile that kill. Monsters growing more powerful as they’re left to stew over time. A community banding together and picking off the right sacrifices.

The perfect kicker is when they had passed by a billboard just as they were leaving Miami, one of those weirdly random signs that must be designed solely to stick in a person’s mind for a long time after. The sign had proclaimed the wonders of the manatees, saying, _Stay for the Manatee Sightings, Mermaids of the Ocean!_ There’d been a flicker of a faded grey tail painted on the billboard – manatee skin, nothing at all like Aycayia, not a transmutation of the beautiful into the monstrous.

“Okay, next time? We get in and we get out.”

“If we do it that way, we’re doing something wrong,” Sam weakly offers.

“Yeah.” The promise of getting to Georgia , of getting out of this state hasn’t picked up Dean’s mood, still healing from bruises and whatever pull Aycayia had on his mind. Sam’s final research on the matter had suggested it was pretty damn unpleasant. Dean shifts in his seat and floors the accelerator, zooming to a speed that causes a sick lurch in Sam’s stomach, momentary adjustment needed and he has to blink in order to take in the blurry world around the car. As though it’s his final say on the matter, case closed, Dean says, “Hell. I freakin’ hate Florida .”

“But we go where the job takes us, right?”

Rolling his eyes, Dean says, “Oh, man, throwing back what I said to you? That’s so unfair.” A sigh and Dean admits, “Yeah. If we gotta keep on comin’ back to Florida and dealing with their fucked up crap then them’s the brakes.”

“Which you could think about using, the brakes,” Sam mutters, quiet enough that Dean’ll ignore him even though he heard it.

“So let’s head someplace colder. Less crazy.”

“Crazy’s not just regulated to Florida, you know,” Sam says, a little streak of bitchiness edging its way around the words.

“Yeah, I know that but Florida’s the freakin’ Mecca.”

Sam starts seeing a few more Georgia license plates mixed in with the Florida plates and quietly he has to agree with Dean’s estimation there. Hopefully wherever the job takes them next, it’ll be to a landlocked state, he can do with avoiding water for a long time.

Still, he has to do it, force out at least one good thing out of their whole time in Florida. Prodding Dean, Sam says, “The food was really good. There’s that.”

“Oh, you need to end this whole trip on a good note? Here’s the only thing I got going in my tally of why Florida ’s decent: without it, America will be dickless.”

Sam screws up his face, in hopes of scrubbing out the mental image, failing miserably. Sarcastically says, like a cheer, only he doesn’t have a glass to raise, “To Florida.”

Course it’s Dean, and he takes it serious, actually reaching over to bump fists with Sam.

“To Florida.”


End file.
